BRAND ACTIVATIONS & MARKETING

Niche-focused marketing agency Refuel confirms what most of us already suspected: the kids of today consume differently than the kids of yesteryear.

They have money to spend and know exactly what to spend it on. In fact, with total spending at $88B, they have a lot more money than a generation before them. A Parenting Magazine poll found that 46{04d9822e7d95da125d508d8e1efbcf2edc79acd8aec1f0bbdcbd6a6f684f9bb3} of moms involve their children in brand decisions by age 9, and 78{04d9822e7d95da125d508d8e1efbcf2edc79acd8aec1f0bbdcbd6a6f684f9bb3} do so by age 12. They are also digital natives (88{04d9822e7d95da125d508d8e1efbcf2edc79acd8aec1f0bbdcbd6a6f684f9bb3} of 12-15 year olds own a mobile device and 72{04d9822e7d95da125d508d8e1efbcf2edc79acd8aec1f0bbdcbd6a6f684f9bb3} have made an online purchase) and consume an array of off-line media as well including TV, radio and print.

Here a few interesting activations that successfully targeted younger markets, undertaken by specialist youth marketing agencies.

Refuel: Dress up Booth

Refuel backs up all those cleverly engaged New York audiences, focusing on 6-12-year-old girls, to promote Spin Master s La Dee Da Dolls. A dress-up station provided fun costumes for girls while a photo booth allowed girls to take pictures while dressed up in their costumes. Raffles were conducted each hour and staff members dressed as La Dee Da dolls engaged with attendees. More than 3,000 people attended the launch party, and the Times Square Toys R Us sold double the amount of dolls expected that day.

Fuse for Mountain Dew

Fuse is one of youth marketing s heaviest hitters, and their team is ultra-excellent at social media integration. Our favorite example? Mountain Dew wanted to capitalize on the success of their largest event series, the Dew Tour, by creating a one-of-a-kind consumer engagement experience. For the 2014 Dew Tour Beach Championships in Ocean City, MD, the Mountain Dew Experience featured four on-site content activations: the DEW Social Store, Instaprint, Instaprint Mosaic and Selfie Selects stations. The Instaprint station aggregated photos posted with #DOTHEDEW on Instagram and printed the images as stickers for fans to take home. The Instaprint Mosaic was then populated with these photos throughout the event creating a large branded image with all user-generated content.

Archival for Redbull

In partnership with Redbull, Archival sent young travelers on a challenging journey with no currency but their own wits and cans of Redbull to trade for food and assitance. The results? The teams traded over 16 thousand cans of Red Bull, uploaded nearly 8000 photos and 2000 videos, and collectively traveled a over 220 thousand kilometers enough to travel the earth 5 times over! The whole world was watching. During the week, the website generated 1.1 million visits, 2.9 million page views, over 448 thousand likes and shares of website content on Facebook and countless media stories.