Comic Relief

Occasionally in marketing land, you get to work on something really, really worthwhile. I love the brands that I market, but marketing something charitable, as I am going to be doing in the next few months, gives you this extra internal glow and feeling that clinching a normal commercial deal doesn't . SO, for the next few months I will be the Social Media co-coordinator for Red Nose Day 2009: "Do Something Funny for Money". This will involve being responsible for syndicating content to SN's, coming up with creative and strategic ideas, and above all driving people to raise and donate money online. This is a big challenge, but one that will have massive rewards. Not only will I get to work with some of my favorite online partners: Facebook, MySpace, Bebo, YouTube and Flickr, but I will also be charged with trying to figure out how to engage the lost TV generation: the 'Youth Market': ages15 - 20ish. It's a fact: Teenagers don't watch as much TV as they used to, and as a consequence are much less involved with the pinacle of Red Nose Day: the BBC one night special where most money is donated in one go. So how do we catch these little hormonal dudes and engage them if they aren't into the show?

Well, we know from reports from nice people at Nielsen and ComScore and the like that this age group are definitely spending their time doing a million and one different things online, and in all kinds of Digital spaces for that fact: Twitter, YouTube, MySpace, Google, iPlayer, Flickr, iPhone, pod casts, blogs, digital music downloads, digital TV etc etc...in fact they hardly have an alliance to any one thing as they consume and use EVERYTHING.

EEK.

Quite a mammoth task to catch them all in one place somewhere...but what a great challenge. After all, this generation will be the fund raisers of the future, and I want them to feel engaged, passionate and above all motivated to be involved with the campaign: even if it is just passing a video onto their mate, rather than donating loads of ££££££'s. Hopefully the £££££'s will come at some point along the line later on.....

So whether it's amazing celeb content, comedy, music, mash-ups, skins, apps, widgets, wodgets and bodgets, Red Nose Day 2009 is here for the digital generation.

Watch this space.