Here at Digit we like to think we’re pretty hip young cats and are down with the kids (in the discoclubs). So we were very excited to “check” the latest “jam” from teen sensation (and 2008 X Factor finalist) Eoghan Quigg.
I know right.. pretty dope! No doubt our resident DJ Henry will be “dropping” this in one of his “sets” sometime soon.
Interestingly, 17-year-old Eoghan delivers a stinging rejection of social networking sites like Myspace and Facebook. “Can’t you try to find some room for me in your life?” he laments to his preoccupied sweetheart; echoing the 16th Century sonneteer Sir Thomas Wyatt (anyone?)
Is this significant? Is Eoghan Quigg heralding a mass rejection of social networking by the age-group who first adopted it? Well, no. Obviously. But there have been some interesting facts to emerge recently about the ways teenagers consume social media which we should probably be paying attention to.
On the front page of the Financial Times today was a story about this report written by a 15-year-old intern at investment bank Morgan Stanley. One of his main insights is that teenagers simply aren’t using Twitter as “it’s pointless”. This kind of makes sense if you think about it. Twitter is all well and good if you’re Ashton Kutcher and have 2.7 million people hanging on your every tweet. But if, like most people, you only have about 15 followers, the chances are only a handful will see what you have written before your post disappears into the digital ether. So yeah, what exactly is the point?
More and more, I think Twitter will become an broadcast-only medium where people follow the posts of certain famous people they’re interested in but don’t bother writing anything themselves.
The report also has some interesting opinions on music – he reckons most teenagers have never bought a CD for example. They are, however, starting to turn away from illegal downloads in favour of ad-supported streaming sites like Spotify. Good news for the music industry but a new challenge for advertisers. At the moment the “Hi this is Jonathan from Spotify” ads are just annoying enough to turn many people back to the free sites.
If advertisers really want to capitalise on this new and growing audience, they need to think beyond simply churning out shortened versions of a Heart FM spot and treat a Spotify ad as a creative medium in its own right. The key, I would have thought, is to produce multiple versions of the same ad with rotating soundtracks and messaging to ensure listeners don’t get sick of hearing the same spot thousands of times in a row.
Finally, the report dismisses online advertising as ‘extremely annoying and pointless’ which has sparked a spirited debate on the merits of banner ads in the Digit studio. It’s also the topic of Eoghan’s next single I believe..
