Reviewing the last few posts, apparently it’s Social Media week here at Collective-Thinking. And that makes sense. Disintegrating audiences in old media threw our industry into a tizzy; re-aggregated audiences in new media like social networks could provide a fresh playground for innovative marketing ideas and programs.
Eric Heneghan–digital smartguy, curious cat, and CEO of Elevation–tapped me into some amazing statistics about Facebook via, well, Facebook. iStrategyLabs culled that social network’s demographic data for the past few years and just published these mind-blowing findings in their latest report:
1) The 35-54 year old demo is growing fastest, with a 276.4% growth rate in the last half year.
2) The 55+ demo is not far behind with a 194.3% growth rate.
3) The largest demographic concentration remains the 18-24 college crowd at 40.8%, but that’s down from 53.8% just six months ago.
4) The 25-34 year population on Facebook now doubles every six months.
In other words, what we considered a youth market now features an emerging concentration of parents and professionals (this isn’t a problem: Facebook provides age filters on their ad targeting).
iStrategyLabs goes on to point out that anyone advertising alcohol can now reach an age-screened audience of nearly 28 million people: nearly two thirds of Facebook users. The trick for the Budweisers and the Beams will be converting this targeting into engaging creative marketing programs that this captive but highly-particular community will embrace. Creatives can’t simply pattern their work on a set precedent here. Unlike the Super Bowl, we can’t look back at years of big ads to determine how we are going to enter the program with our work.
Considering how tired and uninspired so much of that work seemed last weekend, that could be a good thing. This is a time when creatives can get really creative, reinventing platforms and experiences and messages in a medium where no one has outlined the rules yet. Inevitably, someone will step up and earn recognition as the Lewis and Clark of this wild, unexplored territory.
That sounds like fun.