Clarissa Explains Cost-effective Marketing Strategy

Hey marketing strategists: why sink tons of money into demographic/media-buying research when you can just watch TV and dick around on the the Internet?

Could it actually be that easy? Can you really learn these very difficult lessons about where to allocate advertising dollars in this complicated modern media landscape by just doing the dumb stuff you do to kill time? Perhaps you can.

Between July 25th and 26th, for almost 48 solid hours, every trending topic on Twitter referred to the new Teen Nick “The 90’s Are All That” block of nostalgia programming. For those not familiar, think Nick at Nite, but instead of Dick Van Dyke and Leave it to Beaver, it’s the early 90’s shows from Nickelodeon: forgotten classics like Doug, Rocco’s Modern Life, and Legends of the Hidden Temple.

This unqualified takeover of the Twitter zeitgeist tells us something really interesting: that the people who are tuning into those shows are also very actively using twitter and–one can assume–other social networks as well.

So what?

So, if you're interested in attracting the 18-35 year old tech-savvy market, that’s a probably a good station/airtime block to sink some advertising dollars in to. And if you’re already buying time there and you aren’t also leveraging social media, you probably should be, as you can count on your audience being adept and frequent users.

The abundance and direction of social media in a marketing budget is something that keeps project managers and media strategists up at night. Having some direction like what kind of demographics are actively engaging with brands is the kind of solid gold data those folks pay gobs of money for. Just pay attention to the free indicators that exist in the world, and you might be able to save some of that research cash, freeing it up for bigger, more directed advertising budgets.