Engagement Marketing: Share The Love

Youth Marketing Conference Presentation Coverage:

11:00 am: “Engagement Marketing” with Jim Scheinman, Bebo VP Business Development & Sales.

As a prelude to our coverage of the Youth Marketing Conferece, Eric and I interviewed Jim Scheinman in Marketing.fm podcast #5.

Introduction: Jim Scheinman has been involved in the Social Networking space since it’s inception – he directed sales and business development at Friendster. Jim now works for Bebo, the 3rd largest social networking site in the US and the largest in the UK, Ireland, Australia, & New Zealand. Bebo skews younger than MySpace & Facebook with a dominant presence in the 13-26 year old demo.

To kick off the presentation, Jim suggested that “Web 1.0 advertising is over” (or rather, the notion of simply placing banner ads on a highly trafficked websites, hoping for customer retention).According to Jim, social networking is ideal for targeting youth and younger demographics. Here are some statistics:

• 55% of all teens use a social networking site: Bebo, MySpace, Facebook etc.

• 48% use the site daily or more often

• 6.5% of all online advertising budgets were spent on social networking sites in 2006

• 25 minutes = the average amount of time spent during a session

Brands can be creative with their SN campaigns. Some examples include: widgets that can be shared and placed on one’s home page; branded “skins” that can be temporarily adopted on one’s home page; creative video previews etc. Recently, Bebo ran highly successful campaigns for NBC’s hit series “Friday Night Lights” and Disney’s movie “Cars.” Bebo users willingly adopted the promotional site decorations and shared video previews with friends which spread awareness naturally.

Jim also noted that advertising budgets are not necessarily keeping up with the rate and pace of which social networking is adopted. Therefore, this could be an especially cost efficient arena for online media campaigns that are looking to target the youth demographic. It is also particularly exciting for brands who are interested in creating fun, viral & interactive product initiatives.

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