Kaiser Family Foundation | Neil Howe | youth media | executive vice president

One company that has built several businesses - from catalogs to research - around youth marketing is Alloy Media + Marketing. "Teen marketing is probably the sweet spot, whereas 10 years ago, college was," says executive vice president Derek White. "The rest of society is taking their cues from this age group - even what kinds of cars the parents should consider. They have an amazing impact on every segment." Today's youths also stand a much greater chance of being exposed to marketing throughout their day than ever before. The average eight- to 18-year-old spends nearly six and a half hours a day with media, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation's report, "Generation M: Media in the lives of 8- to 18-year-olds." And 26 percent of the time, they're multitasking and using more than one form of media. "Marketing to young people is at the heart of what everybody in the youth media thinks about," says Victoria Rideout, vice president and director of the Kaiser Family Foundation's Program for the Study of Entertainment Media and Health. "Most of the media is marketing itself as a platform for marketing." Along with classic advertising vehicles like television and magazines, tweens and teens are avid consumers of technologies like the Internet, cell phones, and beyond.

Who are these kids?
Today's tweens and teens are known as the Millennials. Though they're not a homogenous group, they share traits that are markedly different than those of their predecessors, Generation X. "Everybody has to retool their assumptions and expectations," says Neil Howe, a historian, an economist, and a coauthor of Millennials Rising: The Next Great Generation. "People get a generation right just when it's leaving."

Howe says some of the hallmarks of the Millennials include: