May 2007 Trends: Men 18–34

video games
Fans Can Take a Shot at 'Halo 3' Online for Brief Time
The next installment of the sci-fi shooter series won't be in stores until fall, but hard-core fans can begin a three-week trial run of the game in online multiplayer mode.

OGDC: Games, Brands and Tasty Snacks
Cheetos wanted to get in on the burgeoning branded games market. The marketing suits were interested when the hired development house offered up a game that involved some fun & free paint-balling online action. The game was green-lit and all was well. When it was complete, the marketers sat down to play the game they’d paid for. The developers had thought it would be a great idea to let the kids shoot the famed mascot. They were right. The kids would have loved that. The marketers didn’t. The game was scrapped. Chester never got to be splattered with virtual paint.

National Amusement Brings Live Gaming to Theater
U.S. movie theater chain National Amusements is bringing a live video gaming tournament sponsored by Rupert Murdoch-controlled companies to a Los Angeles theater this weekend in a first for an industry seeking new ways to fill empty seats.

 
websites to watch
iuGen - Internet User Genome Project
An Internet User Genome - social network site with a "Helix" twist

MySpace Lays Claim to Fresh-Faced Flektor
Flektor, a widget creation service that is only a few weeks old, has just been tagged "taken" by MySpace, divulges TechCrunch.

Critical Metrics
This music site tracks and aggregates recommendations and playlists across all media (including TV, newspapers, magazines, retailers, DJs and bloggers), not only enabling site visitors to see what music people are talking about but also allowing them to listen to it directly on the site.

 
blog news
Digg Allows Posts With HD DVD Crack
News site ignores cease-and-desist letters in favor of users. The encryption code used to protect HD DVD movies has been immortalized online after Web users revolted this week.

Mpire to Offer Bloggers Free e-Commerce 'Widgets'
Looking to capitalize on its shopping analytics, Seattle's Mpire is rolling out about 80 new e-commerce "widgets" Wednesday.

 
interesting articles

Design: Diet Pepsi Muscles In On Male Consumers
40-year-old brand seeks more 'emerging' diet cola drinkers with a hopefully bold, more manly package.

Gmail Users Fewer - but Younger, Richer - Than Yahoo's & Hotmail's
Google's got clout with savvy youth.

Help! Grocery store still overwhelming to men
U.S. men are doing more and more grocery shopping, both for themselves and their families, but retailers are still not doing much to make the trip any more enticing, retail consultants and industry experts said.

Fans Can Take a Shot at 'Halo 3' Online for Brief Time
May 15, 2007
USA Today

A few select fans of Halo 3- maybe a million or so - are about to get a sneak preview of Microsoft's highly anticipated video game.

The next installment of the sci-fi shooter series won't be in stores until fall, but hard-core fans can begin a three-week trial run of the game in online multiplayer mode Wednesday starting at 8 a.m. ET/5 a.m. PT. Those wanting to download and play the game (through June 6) must have the Xbox 360 console system connected to the Xbox Live online network.

A secret code can be found in special packages of another Microsoft game, Crackdown ($60).

"This is going to be the first look at playing Halo in high resolution," says Harold Ryan, studio manager for game developer Bungie. "There's a lot more stuff to play with."

Halo 3 is Microsoft's not-so-secret weapon for its 18-month-old Xbox 360 in the ongoing video game war against Nintendo Wii and Sony PlayStation 3, each released in November.

When Microsoft brought the original Xbox to market in November 2000, Halo helped the fledgling system gain a foothold against industry veterans Nintendo and Sony. Halo 2, released in 2004, became the top-selling Xbox game ever; combined, the Halo games have sold nearly 15 million copies.

After hosting press previews Friday here and in San Francisco, Microsoft is throwing a big Hollywood Halo 3 party tonight to show off the game to stars such as Justin Timberlake . Its price will range from $60 to $130 (for the Legendary Edition in a helmet case).

Online games played on computers often get tested in imperfect "beta" versions, but that is rarely the case for console games. However, Halo is as popular for its online multiplayer battle modes as it is for its single-player sci-fi story line. About 5 million have played Halo 2 online. So far, about 900,000 have bought Crackdown since its February release, so at least that many could participate in the test.

"We knew the beta was going to be available, so we thought, 'Why not blow it out and make it available to as many people as possible and really make an event out of it?' " says Craig Davison, director of marketing at Microsoft. (Microsoft purchased Bungie in 2000 before launching its first Xbox.) "It also gives Bungie a great way to make sure everything is ready for launch."

Michael Chauvet of online game site EvilAvatar.com compares the Halo franchise to The Godfather. "It's probably as big as a game can get. It's a franchise that is so beloved, and it's quality."

Three new environments - the wooded and waterfall-laden Valhalla, the rocky High Ground and the Hoth-like Snowbound - and several new weapons will be previewed.

But players shouldn't expect clues to Halo 3's story line. "It's a little bit of a tease," says Geoff Keighley of Spike TV's Game Head show. "But for these three weeks, these players are going to have a ton of fun experimenting."

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OGDC: Games, Brands and Tasty Snacks
May 10, 2007
Next Generation
By Colin Campbell

Here’s a story of how things can go badly wrong when game developers and marketers get together to promote real world brands. It involves Chester Cheetah and paintball.

Cheetos wanted to get in on the burgeoning branded games market. The marketing suits were interested when the hired development house offered up a game that involved some fun & free paint-balling online action. The game was green-lit and all was well. When it was complete, the marketers sat down to play the game they’d paid for. The developers had thought it would be a great idea to let the kids shoot the famed mascot. They were right. The kids would have loved that. The marketers didn’t. The game was scrapped. Chester never got to be splattered with virtual paint.

At the Online Game Developers Conference in Seattle this morning, Brian Robbins, executive producer at Fuel Industries, talked about the dangers and opportunities involved in creating online games for real world brands.

“These games are entirely funded by marketing and that can make life difficult for developers. Marketers have their own goals and they can be very different to the game developer’s. Mostly they don’t know about games, but they do know about their brand. It might be fun to explode the logo, but it won’t work for them. You can’t defile the brand. You have to make compromises between gameplay and branding.”

Online branded games are big business. Coke Studio peaked with 7 million users. Disney’s Virtual Magic Kingdom has 2 million characters. Nicktropolis gathered 2.5 million registered users in two months. MTV, Wrigley and many others are in this space.

Why? Because it works brilliantly. Kids and adults today are watching less TV and, even when they do watch TV, they dislike commercials and either go to the fridge or Tivo. When they are playing these branded games, they are interacting with the brand in a positive way for long periods of time.

There are other benefits. “These are often big brands outside the virtual space so there are many opportunities to work in offline extensions,” says Robbins. These might include codes on the side of a soda can, or extra virtual characters given away at an amusement park.

Curiously, these games can also offer the developer a certain creative freedom. “In the casual space, there are many kinds of games that just don’t sell, even though they are fun,” said Robbins. “We don’t have to worry about that. We can experiment with gameplay and target audiences that don’t monetize well.”

Robbins says there are some hard and fast rules for branded online games. “Don’t ignore the brand team’s feedback even if they don’t understand games. You are there to push the brand as well as offering entertainment. Most important of all, and I’ve seen this so many times, don’t try to hide the brand’s involvement.”

The numbers show that players are happy to spend long hours interacting with brands that are, effectively, very long commercials. For game developers, this is a market that is bound to grow in the years to come, especially in the MMO space, as more and more marketers abandon the wastelands of TV and embrace interactivity.

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Digg Allows Posts With HD DVD Crack
News site ignores cease-and-desist letters in favor of users
Video Business
May 3, 2007

The encryption code used to protect HD DVD movies has been immortalized online after Web users revolted this week.

HD DVD’s 16-digit encryption code was first broken and posted online by a hacker in January, and can be used by the very tech-savvy to break content protection on HD DVDs, though to what extent is still unclear.

On Tuesday, news aggregate Web site Digg.com took down a story posted by users that included the encryption key for HD DVD. Within hours of pulling the story and closing accounts of users who posted the story, Digg was swamped by new stories posted by other users that contained the key. The uprising even spread beyond Digg’s front page. A song whose lyrics are the 16-digit key was posted on YouTube, Web sites with the key were registered and some blogs even tagged stories with the key.

Late Tuesday, Digg gave in to its users. In a blog post, founder Kevin Rose explained that the site removed the story because it had been sent a cease-and-desist letter. AACS, the licensing body made up of studios and tech companies that controls HD DVD licensing, had quietly sent the letters to Digg, Google and others last month after the hack was first revealed. (Read about AACS's response.)

But, Rose wrote on the site’s blog, “after seeing hundreds of stories and reading thousands of comments, you’ve made it clear. You’d rather see Digg go down fighting than bow down to a bigger company. We hear you, and effective immediately, we won’t delete stories or comments containing the code and will deal with whatever the consequences might be,” he wrote, adding that if they lose, “what the hell, at least we died trying.”

AACS has not commented on the postings or whether it will file suit against Digg and others who posted the code.

DVD’s copy-protection system, CSS, was similarly hacked and posted on the Internet in 2000, though not spread as widely and freely as the HD DVD code.

A judge ruled in the case of DVD that the hacker who posted the CSS decryption code, known as DeCSS, violated the Digital Millennium Copyright Act and barred further postings of the code or links to it. The court rejected the hacker’s claims that posting was protected by the First Amendment right to free speech.

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Mpire to Offer Bloggers Free e-Commerce 'Widgets'
May 9, 2007
Seattle PI

Looking to capitalize on its shopping analytics, Seattle's Mpire is rolling out about 80 new e-commerce "widgets" Wednesday.

The free widgets -- small online tools that easily plug in to Web sites -- will allow bloggers and online publishers to post shopping-related content to their sites and make money by passing leads on to Amazon.com and eBay. Those who download the widgets will keep 100 percent of the revenue, with Mpire hoping to make money by selling custom widgets to large search engines, online marketplaces or other players. It also hopes that the widgets -- if added to hundreds or thousands of Web sites -- will boost Mpire's rankings in search engine results.

"A lot of the bloggers are looking for revenue streams beyond Google AdSense or they are looking for things that are fun and interesting related to what they are blogging about," Mpire Chief Executive Matt Hulett said, adding that 40 percent of MySpace users have an average of 3.2 widgets per blog.

To help populate the blogosphere with the Mpire widgets, the company has inked deals with distributors such as Whateverlife.com and developed them to integrate easily with MySpace, TypePad, WordPress and other blogging platforms.

"A lot of pundits have been saying this is the year of the widget, that this is the year that this really blows out to bloggers and Web publishers," Hulett said.

The Mpire widgets are designed around specific product categories

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National Amusement Brings Live Gaming to Theater
Trying to fill empty seats, theater chain plays host to live video game tournament aimed at qualifying players for pro competition.
CNET
May 10, 2007

U.S. movie theater chain National Amusements is bringing a live video gaming tournament sponsored by Rupert Murdoch-controlled companies to a Los Angeles theater this weekend in a first for an industry seeking new ways to fill empty seats.

National Amusements would be the first U.S. theater chain to tap into the $30 billion global video game market by staging a type of gaming that is enormously popular in Asia.

The tournament, held by the newly formed Championship Gaming Series (CGS) professional league, aims to qualify gamers for its first draft of professional video gaming teams.

"In Korea, they have taken gaming and really made it into an incredible sports entertainment experience. I am hoping this will lead to what is happening over there," said CGS Chief Executive and Commissioner Andy Reif.

The league is sponsored by DirecTV Group, British satellite group BSkyB and STAR in Asia and Australia. Media mogul Murdoch's News Corp. owns almost 40 percent of satellite broadcasters DirecTV and BSkyB and STAR is a wholly-owned unit of News Corp.

The league will provide programming to more than 100 million households worldwide via the News Corp. cable and satellite providers. CGS was founded by PepsiCo's Mountain Dew, Microsoft's Xbox 360 and IGN Entertainment.

National Amusement aims to host other CGS events as it tests the concept of video gaming arenas, called CyGamZ, adjacent to its theaters.

Company President Shari Redstone, who comes out of her father Sumner Redstone's Viacom company, told Reuters that National Amusement sees alternative forms of entertainment such as video game tournaments luring more people to theaters and to CyGamZ.

"I want to be (a) community entertainment destination. I believe it will grow my core business and assist in growing revenue," Redstone said.

Moreover, she said boosting video game play overall should aid the company's video game maker, Midway Games.

Movie foe or friend?
Video games and other in-home entertainment have been blamed for helping to erode U.S. movie theater admissions, which peaked in 2002 at 1.63 billion before sliding back to 1.45 billion last year.

U.S. box office revenue reached a record $9.53 billion in 2004 before falling into a two-year trough and only partially recovering last year.

In the meantime, stadium-style gaming has boomed in Asia, where professional gamers enjoy rock-star status and draw tens of thousands of spectators to competitions.

Theater owners and video game makers share the same core audience--teens and young men. The idea is to draw them into theaters with two forms of entertainment they enjoy, as opposed to losing them to home gaming systems.

National Amusements, the parent company of Viacom and CBS, has been among the most experimental chains in finding uses for its more than 1,500 U.S. and overseas screens when movies aren't playing.

The chain brought live baseball games to East Coast theaters starting with the 2001 World Series, and has offered live entertainment including stand-up comedy, vaudeville-style shows and music at its theaters.

"One of the things I'm trying to do is really have niche demographic programming. I think we can no longer look at moviegoing as a generic experience," Redstone said.

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iuGen - Internet User Genome Project
http://www.iuGen.com/
Technorati
April 29, 2007

An Internet User Genome - social network site with a "Helix" twist ... "iuGen" enables the registered users to build a personal social network "helix" to see how web connected they really are ... and not how web connected they think they are ... :) iuGen has the intention to Encarta these different helixes (as uninvited users can startup an own helix) into one global Internet User Directory - not a "flat" directory but a multi-dimensional one.

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MySpace Lays Claim to Fresh-Faced Flektor
Marketing Vox
May 16, 2007

Flektor, a widget creation service that is only a few weeks old, has just been tagged "taken" by MySpace, divulges TechCrunch. This comes shortly after news of the social networking giant's soon-to-be acquisition of PhotoBucket.

The deal will make hardly a dent in the MySpace pocketbook after it agreed to pay $250 for the photo storage website. Flektor is estimated to cost between $10 and $20 million with potential of an earnout.

Fresh-faced Flektor enables users to build widgets out of their photos, video and text media. Its elaborate functionalities enable audio, effects and transition capabilities, setting it apart from established arena names like RockYou and Slide.

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Critical Metrics
http://criticalmetrics.com
Trendcentral
May 18, 2007

This music site tracks and aggregates recommendations and playlists across all media (including TV, newspapers, magazines, retailers, DJs and bloggers), not only enabling site visitors to see what music people are talking about but also allowing them to listen to it directly on the site.

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Design: Diet Pepsi Muscles In On Male Consumers
40-year-old brand seeks more 'emerging' diet cola drinkers with a hopefully bold, more manly package.
Brandweek
May 21, 2007

The idea: There are two types of diet cola drinkers. One is the "traditional consumer" who is typically female, skews a little bit older than full-calorie soda fans and won't drink anything other than diet beverages. The other segment is the "emerging consumer." Many of these are men who are concerned about their overall health and fitness, currently drink regular colas and want to transition to diet. The emerging consumer now makes up more then half of Diet Pepsi's sales and is steadily growing. PepsiCo's internal team, Pepsi Design Group, Purchase, N.Y., joined forces with Acumen, Houston, to create new packaging that would better appeal to this emerging consumer without alienating its traditional drinker. "If you think about growth for the future, it's about emerging consumers," said Kristina Mangelsdorf, director of marketing for diet colas at PepsiCo.

Challenges: There are two barriers preventing consumers from making the switch from high-calorie drinks to their healthier diet siblings. Taste is the first obstacle; many feel diet doesn't taste as good as regular cola. Image is the other problem. "They think it's uncool. They say, 'My mother drank that,'" said Mangelsdorf. "We need to get consumers to rethink Diet Pepsi." What's more, there is less loyalty among diet drink brands, she said. "They will choose a drink out of habit versus preference." The company's 2007 restage of the brand is centered around the new packaging and its "More cola taste" claim in ads from DDB, New York. Using both, it aims to lure consumers who are not firmly aligned with another diet brand.

How it was created: The graphics brief called for a need to become more contemporary, bold and male-friendly. Acumen was hired for a design that reflected an "intelligent naivete"—meaning Pepsi expected a strong design that would lack historical knowledge of the brand's packaging performance. "We wanted them to come up with a fresh look with no preconceived notions and blend it with the expertise of our internal design," said Mangelsdorf. Pepsi Design Group is "extremely talented and has a history of the brand and what pops off the shelf." Pepsi hired numerous firms to come up with designs, but ended up using one of the first Acumen presented in March 2006. The design, which featured a solid blue background with a silver arch, had been used as a placeholder for its presentations to bottlers.

What didn't make the cut: Acumen's design was tweaked to retain certain core equities like its illustrated water droplets. Acumen also presented a very different version of the logo, which was scrapped. Instead, the team elected to switch the text from a slanted script to block letters. The text as well as the logo were shrunk and the "Light. Crisp. Refreshing" tagline was removed to give it a cleaner look. "We typically don't include the tagline because if it changes, you're stuck," said Mangelsdorf. The bottle itself also was altered along with others bearing the Pepsi trademark to include an embossed Pepsi globe. The globe is the centerpiece of Pepsi's current "More Happy" campaign from BBDO, New York.

The results: Of the emerging consumers polled by PepsiCo, 21% they were more likely to buy Diet Pepsi than before. Even core drinkers embraced it: 6% said they would buy more thanks to its new look.

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Gmail Users Fewer - but Younger, Richer - Than Yahoo's & Hotmail's
Google's got clout with savvy youth
Marketing Vox
May 14, 2007

The marketshare of US visits to Google's Gmail increased 17 percent from February 2007 to April 2007 and was up 30 percent from April 2006 to April 2007, writes MarketingCharts (via Hitwise). Google's Gmail opened up access to all on February 14, 2007.

Yahoo Mail and Hotmail, however, remain the dominant Web-based email services: Yahoo's April 2007 share of visits was 13 times greater than Gmail's; Hotmail's was 6 times greater.

Gmail users, though, are in some ways a more attractive demographic than those of Yahoo Mail and Hotmail, which more closely resemble the general online population in age and socioeconomic status. Gmail users tend to be younger, with higher incomes, and are generally early adopters.

For the four weeks ending April 28, 2007, 54 percent of Gmail visits were from users age 18-34, compared with 42 percent for Yahoo Mail and 44 percent for Hotmail, according to Claritas PRIZM NE social group data (via Hitwise).

Some 18 percent of Gmail's visits were from those with average annual household incomes between $100,000 and $149,999, compared with 15 percent visiting Hotmail and 13 percent visiting Yahoo Mail.

Gmail users are also more likely to be Facebook users: 3.7 percent of Gmail's downstream went to Facebook in April 2007, compared with 2.2 percent for Hotmail and 1.2 percent for Yahoo Mail.

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Help! Grocery store still overwhelming to men
May 27, 2007
Reuters

So, this guy walked into a grocery store ... and got completely overwhelmed.

U.S. men are doing more and more grocery shopping, both for themselves and their families, but retailers are still not doing much to make the trip any more enticing, retail consultants and industry experts said.

"Men do represent a large part of grocery shopping dollars and they aren't being very well accommodated ... sales are being lost," Mandy Putnam, vice president at consulting firm TNS Retail Forward said.

In a recent report titled "Men in Grocery Stores," Putnam said that men shop inefficiently, which leads to missed sales for retailers.

Many men have difficulty finding items, forego buying rather than risk purchasing a substitute for an item on the grocery list and hesitate to ask for help if they can't find an item, Putnam said in her report.

"They never ask for help, except maybe from the butcher, but they always say they never had problems finding anything when the cashier at the register asks," she said.

LESS TRADITION
In 2002, 41 percent of men said they did at least some grocery shopping, a figure that jumped to 61 percent in 2004, according to marketing consulting firm WSL Strategic Retail.

The 2006 survey showed 71 percent of men said they had shopped in a grocery store in the past three months, with 56 percent saying they shopped there in the past week, though WSL changed its method for conducting the survey, so 2006 and 2004 figures are not directly comparable.

Men marrying later, the rise of households where both husband and wife work, and other factors, have led to more men grocery shopping.

"Only one-quarter of American households fall into the old definition of traditional," Michael Sansolo, senior vice president at the Food Marketing Institute, a trade group for food retailers and wholesalers.

Unlike women, male shoppers typically focus more on convenience than price, and retailers will need to cater to that need in order to attract them to their stores, consultants said.

"The stage is just set for men to assume (more) grocery shopping, but it's going to be a much more convenient and efficient trip than a women's approach," Candace Corlett, a principal at WSL said.

One example of a tool to help with efficiency is the Shopping Buddy, a wireless computer on shopping carts at Ahold NV's Stop & Shop stores in the Northeast that alerts shoppers to certain items they might want, among other features, using information from shopper loyalty cards, consultants said.

The desire for convenience also make men a prime target for the Fresh & Easy Neighborhood Market stores British retailer Tesco Plc. plans to open this year in California, Arizona and Nevada, said Ken Harris, principal at consulting firm Cannondale Associates.

TUNNEL VISION
Unlike women, men tend to hone in on the specific thing they want to buy instead of surveying the entire aisle, consultants said. That can be a problem for manufacturers and retailers trying to promote new products that are the life-blood of packaged food companies.

"They were great at picking out the stuff that they bought before. It's the new stuff, or something new and different that a manufacturer is trying to promote, that they have trouble with," said Putnam, who walked along with men as they shopped as part of her study.

Men also tend to bristle at the overwhelming number of choices in grocery aisles, with the cereal aisle being one prime example, Putnam said.

"One guy I thought was going to have a nervous breakdown in the cereal aisle," Putnam said, adding that this man, in his early 30s, worked the night shift as a police officer in a dicey part of town and was otherwise used to stressful situations.

Retailers still refer to their main customer as "she," with women still doing the majority of the family shopping, so a major overhaul of stores to make them more attractive to men is not likely.

But food retailers in general are focusing more and more on segmentation -- tailoring store offerings to shoppers most likely to shop there or that they want to attract. This strategy could attract more male shoppers.

"If you are in a location where you have urban professional males, you are going to have a lot of Gatorade in there," Harris said.

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