Marketing to College Students

Noah Kagan's okdork.com has a great piece about Marketing to College Students. He lists 10 things to keep in mind - most of them are fairly straight forward and yet often form the core of brand efforts targeting the youth market. My favorite one is:

3- don'’t buy TV ads

"The average college student does not have time to watch TV and usually might not even own a TV. It'’s a waste of money and effort."

One that i found to be contrary to what research suggests is - 7- school newspapers are a waste of money. Noah responds to a comment quoting Student Monitor information with this: "I agree that some students peruse the newspaper but successful products can completely avoid them and better spend there money elsewhere. For example, iPod, Better Luck Tomorrow (movie), Google, Napster, Livestrong & numerous more completely avoided the newspaper"

Other sure bets for screwing up youth marketing include;
1) Treating 18-24 year olds as being in one category
2) Naming a product or service with "cool, hip" slang
3) Forgetting that its easier to reach 12-17 years olds
4) Thinking offline traditional campaigns are going to be the fulcrum for introducing a product or service
5) Using an ad agency of 40 year olds to create a viral campaign

Go check out Noah's list of 10 and think about all of the brands that do or don't follow that advice.