This article was published in the January 2012 issue of the Marketing Disease Prevention + Awareness Magazine.

Today’s generation of teenagers and young adults represents a unique class of Internet users, born with the web at their fingertips and an innate ability to navigate it with agility. For this generation, the Internet was not a new technology upending other modes of communication – it was the norm. Most grew up learning to seek out information primarily through search engines instead of card catalogs, engaging with social networks to interact with peers, and watching online video for entertainment.

How will the early adoption of online behaviors among young people impact future activities such as managing finances and making health care decisions? As those under age 25 grow up in an increasingly connected world, one can surmise that these users will be able to quickly and seamlessly adopt online approaches to everyday matters more than any generation before it.

One of the defining issues of the next generation will be health, as we observe both the increasing incidence of many troubling diseases like diabetes but also extraordinary advances in medicine and health care. If we take a look at how young people currently consume health information online, it offers us some insight into what the future online health activity might look like and which content providers stand to benefit.

Young People Are Highly Social Entertainment Consumers

An analysis of U.S. Internet users between the ages of 12-24 reveals that they are heavy consumers of social media and entertainment. In October 2011, this age segment comprised 22.8 percent of the total U.S. online population and spent more than a quarter of their time on the Social Networking category of sites (26.6 percent) – a rate 58 percent higher than that for the average U.S. Internet consumer. Teens between the ages of 12-17 spent an even greater share of time – nearly 29 percent – on social networking, 71 percent greater than the average Internet user.

Next to social networking, 12-24 year-olds spent an eighth of their time on the Multimedia category, 91 percent greater than average. Meanwhile, 12-17 year-olds spent closer to 15 percent of their time on multimedia, more than double the average share. For both the Social Networking and Multimedia categories, 12-24 years old spent the most amount of time compared to other age groups.

Top Categories by Share of Time Spent Online for 12-24 Year-olds
Source: comScore Media Metrix, U.S., October 2011

_{*Index of 100 shows average representation.}

Among the sites visited most by young people ages 12-24, Google Sites ranked as the most visited property, reaching 90 percent of the demographic and accounting for 16.3 percent of all time spent online. Interestingly, YouTube accounted for nearly three-quarters of the time spent on Google Sites. Facebook, which ranked as the second-most visited site, accounted for the greatest share of time spent online at 23.2 percent. 12-17 years old spent an even greater share of their time on both Facebook (25.1 percent) and YouTube (13.9 percent).

How Young People Consume Online Health Information

In contrast to the aforementioned online activities among youngsters, 12-24 year-olds spent the least amount of time visiting the Online Health category when compared to other age groups. This fact is perhaps unsurprising given that older age segments likely have more health care concerns to manage – for themselves and for their families. Nevertheless, 12-24 year-olds represented 21 percent of Health category visitors -- the second largest demographic after 35-44 year olds – an indication that they are a demographic that ought to be addressed in this sector.

In October, 61.5 percent of the 12-24 year olds visited a Health site, a 9-percent increase from last year. Some of their Online Health visitation habits resemble that of the broader Internet population; for example, their most visited Health properties included WebMD Health, Everyday Health, and Livestrong - eHow Health.

However, the younger segment also exhibited some different browsing patterns. They were most likely to visit lifestyle-oriented health sites, such as Lifescript.com and Bliss.com, both of which ranked among the top 10 sites for 12-24 year-olds. Lifescript’s content is divided into five simple sections: Health, Body, Food, Life, Soul. Bliss.com also strongly communicates an integrated approach to health with its content sections: Eat Well, Get Fit, Head to Toe, Wellness, Sanctuary, Do Good. That younger Online Health consumers show an affinity for these sites suggests they may view health as an integrated part of their lifestyle and do not only go to health sites for informational purposes.

Top 10 Health Sites for 12-24 Year-Olds
by Unique Visitors (000)
Source: comScore Media Metrix, U.S., October 2011

This post was originally published at SearchEngineWatch on 1/30/2012.

Growing up I will always remember our family’s Sunday paper routine: Dad would immediately open up the bundle and take out the Sports section, I would jockey with my brother for the Comics, and Mom would furiously attack the coupons with her scissors.

Although this may be a familiar childhood scene for most of you, couponing has evolved far beyond the Sunday paper. Coupons used to pretty much exist in one form: paper. Whether you got them from the newspaper, direct mail, magazines, or from your kids’ school fundraisers, you were in possession of a physical coupon. Nowadays coupons come in many forms, including QR code scans, text messages, and easily redeemable coupon codes when checking out online. Not only has the process for gathering coupons changed, but these new forms of coupons have spawned new coupon using behaviors. Search, in particular, has emerged as a critical tool in coupon-gathering and can tell us quite a bit about how your strategy should evolve as well.

Finding the Coupons

The role of Search as it relates to coupons is pretty straight-forward. Want a coupon? Search for a coupon. Now, rather than waiting a full week for the Sunday paper to cash in on the coupon mother load, you can proactively seek out the coupon you need when you need it. The Coupon Community (or “Team Mom” as my friends call it) collectively band together to find the best deals, exchanging coupons with each other like “Magic: The Gathering” aficionados trade cards. The massive popularity of Extreme Couponing on TLC, The Krazy Coupon Lady, and the like, is further indication that couponing not only isn’t slowing down, but is actually gaining steam.

comScore search data on couponing presents an interesting picture. Between December 2010 and December 2011, searches for “coupon” and “coupons” (broad matched) ballooned to over 63 million for a year-over-year increase of 37%. The total audience of coupon searchers is also growing, up 24% to 21 million searchers at an average of 3 searches per searcher.

Both the number of coupon searchers and their frequency of engagement are growing, but the intensity of coupon searching per person is outdistancing the actual growth of couponers. This does not come as a major surprise considering the popularity of the extreme couponing craze, which instructs its followers to conduct intricate calculations and planning of their coupon combinations to maximize the savings.

This can become particularly important to the manufacturers and retailers offering coupons, as the use of coupons for the most “extreme” couponers is directly linked to their ability to combine them with other coupons to maximize their discounts. I would see this as a positive for CPG manufacturers, and more of a challenge for the individual retail stores. For example, P&G might be happy to have you buy as many of their products as possible in conjunction with other companies’ products at the grocery store as long as this couponing flexibility drives more overall purchases of their brands, but Macy’s would much prefer you do all of your department store shopping within their store than splitting your time between multiple stores. The inability to combine one retailer’s coupons with other retailers’ coupons could mean “extreme” couponers may look past their offers, leading to lost sales.

That being said, the search data does uncover a change in couponing behavior that directly benefits the retailers: Store Brand coupon searching.

Coupons for Entire Stores, not just Products

Traditionally, couponing was product specific. You found coupons for a particular product, Life Cereal for example, but you usually did not come across a coupon to be redeemed for the retailer itself. Consumer Packaged Goods (CPG) companies dominated the coupon landscape and were mostly retailer agnostic.

As e-commerce evolved into the direct buying channel it is today, coupon searching evolved with it. In the previous chart we looked at the total number of searchers and searches for Coupon-related terms, but if you look at the Top 10 versions used by the searchers, 7 are for specific retail stores, like Target, Kohl’s and JC Penney. As you can see in the below chart, the volume of these store brand terms skyrockets in the same way general coupon searching does.

This same trend continues as you move beyond the Top 10 “coupon” terms. In fact, 75% of the top 100 coupon searches were for specific retail store brands. This is a far cry from the pre-e-commerce days of couponing, limiting you to specific products that were being marketed to you.

Proactive coupon searching clearly lends itself directly to retail store brands, which leads us to an important realization for retailers: your shoppers may be searching for coupons before coming to your site, or they may do it once they’ve already decided to make a purchase with you. Many retailers understandably cringe knowing that these last-minute coupon scoopers could be unnecessarily driving down the price of their goods among consumers who will actually pay full price. But the other side of the argument is that offering coupons and discounts might be the price of admission these days, a necessary marketing expenditure to reach consumers who are increasingly looking for confirmation of value before making a purchase. If a retailer wants to maintain its share of wallet, it had better be front and center with these cost-conscious consumers – even at a cost to their margins.

Couponing and discounts remains a delicate balancing act for retailers, but if the surge in coupon searching is any indication, it is a behavior that consumers have clearly become conditioned to today. Retailers who don’t engage with consumers on this turf just might find themselves left out in the cold.

As the best performing asset classes of the past decade, silver and gold have been hot topics on the financial news scene.  But how widespread is the interest in this investment choice, and what do we know about the investors who do show interest in these precious metals?  To answer these questions we applied to investments the same behavioral research techniques pioneered by comScore for understanding consumer brands. 

As an initial gauge of interest, we looked at visitation to websites focused on precious metals.  We found that the number of unique visitors to these sites have exploded, with many experiencing double- and triple-digit percent growth.

We also took a look at these visitors’ demographic makeup.  Take for example Coinflation.com, a website that acts as a precious metals news aggregator as well as an up-to-the-minute silver coinage valuator.  A snapshot of their December 2011 visitation demographics shows a broad-based distribution with skews typical of investment sites: males, older, and higher household income.

_{Source: comScore Media Metrix (December 2011)}

We eventually came to the question: are these visitors actually willing to invest in silver and gold, or are they just researching their options and eventually decide against it?  To understand this, we applied comScore’s proven Share of Choice technique to various investment options.  As part of a prize drawing, a census-representative group of six hundred individuals were given the option of winning an equal value investment of their choice.  That is, they could win their choice of:

• U.S. Corporate Stocks/Bonds (companies of their choice)
• Non-U.S. Corporate Stocks/Bonds (companies of their choice)
• Treasuries (U.S. Savings Bonds, Treasury Notes, or Treasury Bills)
• Bank Money Market or Cash Deposit (financial institution of their choice)
• Silver/Gold (physical bullion or coin).

The results are very telling, with 29 percent choosing the Silver/Gold option.  With regards to gender, the ratio mirrored the above site visitation with 32 percent of men and 26 percent of women choosing the precious metals.  The makeup for household income on the other hand did not show the same pattern as the website visitation data, being more similar across groupings.  This may be because lower income individuals do not have the same degree of liquid investment money and so do not seek out financial information at the same rate as those with higher income.

But perhaps the most interesting distributions are those that reflect political and economic outlook.  In particular, political party affiliation demonstrated a strong trend, with choice for metals among independents being near the mean, Democrats and Greens indexing below, and Republicans and Libertarians indexing well above.

Percent Choosing Silver/Gold Option
By Political Affiliation*

_{* Which of the following best describes your political affiliation?}

Similarly, inflation expectation was a key driver.  The Silver/Gold option was chosen at a substantially higher rate by those who expected prices of staples such as food, gasoline, utilities and medicine to be higher a year from now.

Percent Choosing Silver/Gold Option
By Staple Price Expectations*

_{* What are your expectations for the prices of staples such as food, gasoline, utilities and medicine a year from now?
Compared to today will they be:}

The data also suggests that individuals are looking at precious metals for portfolio diversification.  In the study, only about 4 percent of individuals indicated they currently invest in silver and gold bullion/coins; compared to 64 percent who indicated that they currently invest in one of the above options or a savings account.  While the vast majority of current silver/gold owners continue to prefer that option, a quarter to a third of those holding other investments now also prefer silver/gold.  So move over “gold bugs”, you now have some company.

The digital revolution has touched us all, bringing extraordinary services to our finger tips and improving our lives in ways that would have been inconceivable just a short time ago. In recent years, Chicago has seen a variety of new technology companies explode onto the digital scene. While Groupon has understandably garnered a huge amount of attention on its own, there have been many other successful Chicago startups, some since acquired but many others still growing rapidly and independently in a variety of fascinating digital sectors. Every week, it seems, a new digital company is born in Chicago.

Recognizing the importance of capital to early stage companies, but also the critical role that an experienced mentor can play in helping a CEO navigate turbulent early stage waters, a group of founders from Chicago have come together to found and fund a unique venture capital effort: The Chicago FireStarter Fund. The fund has $5.7 million in committed capital from 42 founding members. The founders each have a successful track record in starting and growing digital companies and bring investment capital plus extensive management experience to the fund. I’m delighted to be one of the fund’s founders, helping Chicago-area entrepreneurs as best I can.

comScore’s roots were seeded here in Chicago when my co-founder Magid Abraham and I first met while both working for Information Resources (IRI), so it’s a pleasure for me to be able to help other Chicago area founders as they build their businesses. The Chicago area has long been associated with successful information and technology companies, with comScore, IRI and Groupon immediately coming to mind. Who knows, maybe even the next $5 billion IPO will be one of the portfolio of companies funded by FireStarter!

The fund will focus its investments in companies that are:

• Digital Media & Marketing, Software as a Service or eCommerce (with a focus on social, mobile and big data)
• Incorporated in the U.S. The fund can invest in companies anywhere in the United States. However, given that all of the fund’s members are based in Chicago, it is likely that most of the investments the fund makes will be in the greater Chicago area, Illinois and the upper Midwest.

FireStarter will source investments directly from through its member network and through its relationships with many venture funds, entrepreneurs and industry leaders Companies that would like to apply for a potential investment by FireStarter can find all of the relevant information here.

Ever since leading comedian Louis CK announced the release of his new stand-up comedy special for $5 over his website louisck.net, the media has been abuzz about the potential for this sort of digital distribution model to be successful and shift the paradigm for the way content is marketed and distributed. The results appear to show that CK’s effort was a fairly unmitigated success, generating more than $1 million in revenue against $250,000 in production costs. After covering his costs, CK generously donated a significant portion of the proceeds to several charities, paid his staff handsomely, and kept the remainder for himself – truly a win-win-win effort.

I remember the last digital content distribution experiment generating this much discussion back in October 2007 when world-renowned band Radiohead decided to launch its new album, In Rainbows, over the web using the highly experimental pay-what-you-want model. Offering its fans free access to its new album under a digital honor system, it was hoped, would generate enough goodwill that people would gladly pay a reasonable amount to download the album. But if a consumer wanted to download it for free they were allowed to do that. At the time, comScore data showed mixed results. Approximately 3 out of 5 downloaders did so while paying nothing, and the average downloader paid just $2.26. The average among those who paid something was around $6.

What was interesting about the Radiohead model is that despite the fact that it created goodwill with its fans, some music enthusiasts at the time were used to illegally downloading music for free and perhaps felt entitled to download the album without paying for it. The Louis CK experiment did not offer consumers such an option and set a simple and reasonable price of $5, while understanding that some particularly motivated freeloaders could probably find a way to get a copy of the download for nothing. Nevertheless, enough fans clearly found the $5 price point reasonable and made the purchase without a second thought, delivering value to the audience and content producers without as much need for other players in the traditional distribution chain.

I also found interesting CK’s comments about why the economics of this model were so favorable. He noted that his site and that of a major studio have the same bandwidth, which levels the playing field from a distribution standpoint. All of the economies of scale with traditional marketing and distribution channels go away when content gets distributed over the web and the individual content owner/publisher can compete with traditional media companies. Now there is certainly some truth to that, though I would also argue that not every content owner/publisher is able to get the free media exposure that a top comic like Louis CK can attract. In the weeks surrounding its release, you couldn’t help but see him all the late night talk shows or the slew of articles talking about his experiment.

Putting the pure economics of the model aside for a moment, another fascinating aspect of the CK experiment is exactly who paid to download the content. We took a look at the demographic composition of these downloaders for the month of December and found particularly heavy skews towards audiences that are often not easily reached via traditional media channels. In particular, the downloading audience was overwhelmingly male (94%) and between the ages of 18-34 (82%). In addition, most came from middle-income households with the majority (51%) making between $40,000 and $74,999 per year. There was also a very notable skew towards people in the South, which accounted for a majority (55%) of downloaders.

Combine all these demographic characteristics, and you get the profile of a working class 18-34 year old male in Middle America, a segment of the population critically important to advertisers because of the expected future growth in their spending power.

So we have a segment of consumers that is both willing to pay, but also valuable to advertisers, which begs the question of which is more appropriate: a pay model or ad-supported model. I’d argue that if you can get consumers to pay for content that is almost always the better choice, since you would need to reach an audience many times larger to derive anywhere near the same amount of revenue via a pay-for-content model.

Is there an opportunity to maximize revenue using a hybrid model, where you charge consumers but still include some advertising or sponsorship of the content? It’s certainly possible, but in CK’s case I think part of the willingness of consumers to buy was the authenticity with which he presented the choice to buy to consumers. In a message posted to those who might “torrent” the video, he wrote, “Please bear in mind that I am not a company or a corporation. I’m just some guy. I paid for the production and posting of this video with my own money.” Would people heed his message had he also taken corporate advertising money? Perhaps not.

So the economics of this direct-to-consumer model are very interesting, and I would argue, context-specific. What works for the goose may not work for the gander. Because Louie CK comes across as a genuine guy who has worked hard and paid his dues for his success, many of his constituents identify with that fact and are willing to chip in the $5. But clearly not every content producer would engender the same sort of loyalty from his / her fans, so there’s a legitimate question as to how far out this model might extend.

And ultimately, I don’t think we’ll know any better until more entertainers across a wider spectrum of talent continue to experiment and give us more data to analyze. I enjoy seeing entertainers like Louis CK succeed in these efforts, but I suspect many others would not be so lucky. Not every one of them would be able to generate enough free media to make up for the marketing muscle big corporations can provide.

So until we know more, I will just say that in the right instances these models show promise. But, I suspect, they lack the ability to scale in a way that would truly prove disruptive to the current economic model for professionally produced content.

But that doesn’t mean the artists should stop trying…