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April 2008 - Strategy Magazine
Youth report

40 pushing 16
Youth culture rules, encompassing every age group in its glow

by Natalia Williams
page 45

Be happy, it's finally true: you're an ageless wonder. At least that's the message behind more and more marketing today.

As baby boomers redefine what it means to age (40 is the new 30, after all) and young people control the media sphere, the line between youth and adult marketing is blurring. Youth culture is now contemporary culture, and gone are the days when marketing to youth and adults employed different age-appropriate tactics and strategies.

"Youth culture used to be about a specific age group," says Ken Therrien, CD at DDB KidThink, the Vancouver-based youth agency. "Now it's about an attitude that transcends age groups. The quest for youth and youthfulness is driving popular culture."

While youth culture has always been a precursor of trends, what's different now, according to experts, is that seismic societal and technological movements are contributing to a complete upheaval of the definitions of young and old. Today, young people live at home and stay in school longer, delaying marriage and having children. The result is, in a sense, an extended adolescence.

It has also, says Robert Barnard, founder of Toronto-based Decode, resulted in the creation of a youth/adult life stage that his research agency calls the Young Independents.

Based on research from a June 2007 Decode report, Barnard says that Young Independents represent about 10% of the Canadian population. "They are 18 to 35, even 40, not in school and don't have kids," he says. "They can be in a common-law relationship, married or single, any of those combinations, [but]

they are in between those two institutions of school and family."

Barnard says it is a stage where those living it may feel uncertain about where their lives are going, but those on the outside covet its appearance of freedom and lack of responsibility. "It is becoming the societal signal of youthful," he says. "The Young Independent is a more contemporary version of youthfulness as opposed to a teenager."

Technology - namely the Internet - is also profoundly contributing to the upheaval. "Media has changed over the past 10 to 15 years in a way that we've never seen before," says Mike Farrell, partner and chief strategic officer at Toronto-based youth agency Youthography. "The Internet is the new printing press. And the people who are in charge, born into this new printing press, are young people.

"For us, a culture of 30+, [the Internet is] learned behavior. For them, it's just what's up. It's all about them, and it's all been driven by them." Farrell points to the fact that social networks such as Facebook, MySpace and even Google and eBay were all created by people in their early 20s - and have

permeated the wider cultural landscape rapidly and completely.

"What's happening with this generation is that they're actually driving trends - both psychographics and values," he says. "They're changing demography and, on top of that, they're in charge of the entire media. Everything's coming together, so it's a perfect storm of youth culture completely and utterly influencing the larger mainstream culture in a more robust way than ever before."

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