Final_Intel_LogoIn the last few years, Intel’s advertising has become a lot less inward-focused. For decades, the company’s “Intel Inside” campaign directed consumers’ attention to the chips that Intel puts inside electronic devices. While that campaign (with its instantly recognizable bong-bong-bong jingle) helped make the company what it is today, Intel hasn’t been content to rest

It seems youth marketing has always been a hot topic in the advertising world. As young people move from the “discovery” phase of their tween years to the “experimental phase” of young adulthood, they shift from being motivators of their parents’ buying habits to influential consumers in their own right. But today that demographic is extremely important. Not only are today’s young people the first true digital natives and harbingers of how digital media will influence how we all interact with brands, but also, as baby boomers age and their $400 billion in annual consumption slows, retail, food, and entertainment companies are counting on millennials to fill the gap.

One marketer that has been particularly successful in tapping the youth market is Erin Yogasundram, the twenty-one year old founder of Shop Jeen, an online boutique that sells everything from dollar packs of Ouija gum to $530 filigree sunglasses. Yogasundram launched Shop Jeen in March of 2012, while she was a junior at George Washington University (GWU). She started out with posting cell phone photos of new products to Instagram and filling orders out of her dorm room. The Instagram feed and the business were such an immediate hit that Yogasundram walked away from the remainder of her full-ride scholarship at GWU and moved to New York City, where Shop Jeen now has three offices, nine employees, and half a million Instagram followers.

The Way I See It

  • I see a retail industry increasingly focused on millennial and youth marketing. As baby boomers age, their $400 billion in annual consumer spending will fade. The world will turn to millennials to make up the difference.
  • I see a demographic increasingly inclined to shop at multi-brand retailers and to do their shopping online.  According to recent research by Piper Jaffray, roughly eighty percent of teens shop online. Piper Jaffray’s research also confirms millennials’ growing reliance on peer recommendations when making buying decisions.
  • I see a social media market in continued flux as young people gravitate toward new platforms; according to the latest semi-annual Pew survey on teens and social media. While Facebook still has the largest number of teen and millennial users and those users have their largest networks on Facebook, the percentage of teens citing it as their most important social network has fallen by half, from forty-two percent in the fall of 2012 to twenty-three percent in the fall of 2013. In that same period, the percentage of teens citing Instagram as their most important network doubled.

The Way the Industry Sees It

I sat down with Shop Jeen’s founder, Erin Yogasundram, to discuss her brand and how she uses social media to build a customer base.

Where did your initial vision for Shop Jeen come from? What niche or need did you want to fill?

I started the company, junior year, in my dorm room at The George Washington University. I had worked a few internships in the fashion industry in high school as well as during my winter and summer breaks in college.  I was working three part time jobs in retail, and one day I thought, I could do this myself.  I have always been an entrepreneur, and for example I sold autographs online when I was twelve and owned a shoelace selling business in high school. While working retail, I found that I had a keen eye for what would sell well.  I was always suggesting new brands for the stores to carry and had an invisible hand in the buying process.  I had about $2,000 saved from working retail and blew it all on a Celine bag (the bag was very rare, and had a wait list process at the time).  I have always been a workaholic and never a bookworm, so I quickly realized I could have used that money to start a new venture for myself.  I then sold the Celine bag for $3,000, yielding a $1,000 profit!  I decided to pool my money into wholesale purchase orders to fund my new venture.  Initially the site was to be a hub for the “best of Etsy.”  Etsy was gaining popularity, but it was very difficult to navigate and find the good stuff.  I used my keen eye, combined that with my researching skills, and I was able to find the cream of the crop on Etsy.  I negotiated wholesale terms with the sellers on there – most of which did not know what wholesale even meant when I approached them – and Shop Jeen was born.  I coded the original website from trial and error CSS writing.  I sold on campus at every event possible.  And I slowly started bringing on more well-known brands to gain traction and reputation in the industry.  Though we do carry some of the same brands as Bloomingdales, Urban Outfitters, Hot Topic, Bergdorf Goodman, Nasty Gal, Spencer’s Gifts, and ASOS, our curation is what makes us unique. So unique, in fact, that those retailers would not normally be mentioned in the same sentence.

What’s your curation process like? How do you decide what makes it on ShopJeen.com, and how have your decisions affected revenue?

Our Creative Director, Amelia Muqbel, and I work very closely to decide what products are sold, our marketing strategy, our social media voice, the look of our graphics, etc. Everything Shop Jeen stands for is a true representation of the two of us. Luckily, we somehow managed to find each other in this massive world. We share a very unique sense of style, thought-process, and outlook on the world, which is why we work so well together. I think our cohesive mindset comes across when you visit Shop Jeen.  We approach everything from a different angle than everyone else, and I’d say this has aided our success.  We quickly pull apart “competitors’” strategies and try to do the exact opposite.  It sounds crazy, but it’s been working! A lot of retailers are trying to mimic each other in order to come out on top, but if everyone is doing the same thing, how boring is that going to be for the consumer?

Continue Reading Youth Marketing: How the Founder & CEO of Shop Jeen Builds a Customer Base

A phenomenon that has been present as a form of advertising for many years is now blossoming in digital media and the subject of much discussion in the industry:  native advertising.  Native advertising is content that promotes a brand or product in the native format of the website, publication, or platform in which it is presented.  Native advertising looks different for each medium – for instance, a Sponsored Story on Facebook, Featured Partner content on BuzzFeed, a branded or promoted playlist on Spotify, or a traditional advertorial page in a magazine are all types of native advertising.

As more advertising dollars flow away from traditional display advertising into native advertising, the seamless integration of brand messaging into entertainment, news, and other content that native advertising provides has generated concern and debate over the need for adequate disclosure and guidelines to ensure that consumers are aware that the content is advertising as well as the need to keep the content consistent with advertisers and publishers’ core brand values so that consumers will remain engaged.

Last week, the head of Google’s webspam team published a YouTube video reminding advertisers and agencies that they must clearly disclose that native advertising content is advertising, including links that they pay content creators to include in content or paid search links purchased through Google, which consumers may otherwise believe are freely-endorsed or top-ranked pages.  This is not a new issue for the publisher or advertisers who participate in paid search placement, and was highlighted by the FTC in a 2002 letter responding to Commercial Alert’s complaint against search engine companies alleging that consumers were misled to believe that search results are based on relevancy or actual page clicks, when they were really based on paid placement.  The FTC declined to take action against the companies then, but issued warning letters recommending that search engine companies ensure that paid search results are clearly and conspicuously disclosed to consumers.

The Way I See It

  • I see publishers, content creators, blogs, advertisers, and agencies beginning to pay more attention to the business and legal issues surrounding native advertising, with an emphasis on more clear disclosure that native ads are paid content while striving to retain the organic, seamless qualities that make native advertising effective.
  • Many publishers will, like The Atlantic recently did after a negative reaction from its readers to a native blog post sponsored by the Church of Scientology, revise their editorial guidelines focused on how native advertising will be formatted, styled, and disclosed.
  • Continue Reading Native Advertising Isn’t New, but Considerations for Advertisers Are Just Heating Up