Mia Hill Media

By: Mia Hill

an Interview with Simon Uwins —

As more and more consumers use mobile devices to access the internet, marketers have to turn their attention to the new and different ways they can market to their consumers (Smith, 2019). One way of managing market tactics is by categorizing consumers (Smith, 2019). Many marketers are interested in a category of people called Digital Natives. A 2019 study categorizes Digital Natives age-wise as people born after the mid-90s. Digital Natives have grown up using technology in their daily lives and see smartphones as an extension of their bodies (Smith, 2019). Digital Natives have even been described as people who live online (Friedrich et al., 2010). Smith states that Digital Natives go by multiple names such as Gen Z, Net Gen, and Gen C (2019). However, after speaking with Simon Uwins, a marketer and brand specialist with over 30 years of experience, he contradicts this notion that Digital Natives are the same as Gen Z (S. Uwins, personal communication, October 13, 2020). Uwins does not believe marketers should only see Digital Natives as those born after the mid 90s because plenty of people outside of the age restriction use technology in the same way. Therefore, only viewing Digital Natives as people who grew up between the Mid-90s to 2020 means that companies are missing out on a massive market of consumers who have characteristics of Digital Natives, but are considered too old and are therefore ignored.

Furthermore, Uwins doesn’t believe that marketers can truly know what Digital Natives want because people from different backgrounds would need different things (S. Uwins, personal communication, October 13, 2020). The study by Smith, which sought to understand the preferences of Digital Natives in mobile advertising, found that Digital Natives prefer ads with coupons (Smith, 2019) One other study found that Gen Z strongly dislikes non-skippable ads (Southgate, 2017). However, Uwins would argue that you can’t know what Digital Natives or Gen Z-ers want by looking at these categories’ characteristics because people in these categories are in different stages of their lives (S. Uwins, personal communication, October 13, 2020). For instance, someone who grew up in the suburbs and had children would need to be marketed differently from a high school teen who plays sports. However, they are both considered digital natives and are therefore lumped into the same category. 

One other study found that if consumers have a positive attitude toward advertisements on apps, they are more likely to watch ads on apps (Cheung, 2017). I asked Uwins how it would affect brands if consumers did not like ads and found them annoying. Meaning, would those annoying ads negatively affect the brand, or do consumers see all ads as annoying and not just a select few? Although it has not been extensively studied, Uwins found in research that over mailing customers negatively affected the specific brand (S. Uwins, personal communication, October 13, 2020). Those customers who received too many ads from a brand did not spend as much through the company. Although this is not directly related to mobile advertising, one can infer that generally, people do not like getting excessively advertised to even if they liked the brand in the first place. 

Lastly, the implications from one study found that marketers should over invest in Gen Z related media and creative content even if they are not the majority demographic for a company (Southgate, 2017). In doing so, brands will be better prepared for what’s to come in the future. Uwins agrees but believes that “generally [he] thinks that’s true regardless. You should always be researching, looking at, investing in, experimenting with your next flow of customers coming through… regardless of [if they are Gen Z]” (S. Uwins, personal communication, October 13, 2020). Therefore, the same could have been said twenty years ago.

References

Cheung, M., & To, W. (2017). The influence of the propensity to trust on mobile users’ attitudes toward in-app advertisements: An extension of the theory of planned behavior. Computers in Human Behavior, 76, 102–111.

Friedrich, R., Peterson, M., Koster, A., & Blum, S. (2010). The rise of Generation C: Implications for the world of 2020. Strategy&. Retrieved October 20, 2016, from http://www.strategyand.pwc.com/media/file/Strategyand_Rise-of-Generation-C.pdf.pdf

Southgate, D. (2017). The emergence of Generation Z and its impact in advertising: Long-term implications for media planning and creative development. Journal of Advertising Research, 57(2), 227-235.

Smith, K. (2019). Mobile advertising to Digital Natives: preferences on content, style, personalization, and functionality. Journal of Strategic Marketing, 27(1), 67–80.