SELLING products to today's youth market is a tough job - wherever you are in the world - Hong Kong's marketing community has been told.
'Getting today's teenagers to focus on a TV commercial for 30 seconds is a really tough job,' Barbara Feigin, executive vice-president of Grey Advertising, told the Grey Pacific speaker breakfast last Friday.
'The average American [child] watches more than 22 hours of television a week and even the youngest of them feel like they have seen it all before.' Ms Feigin, who has risen through the Grey ranks since 1969 to become executive vice-president of New York City's largest agency, was in Hong Kong for the first time.
She said the unique marketplace in Hong Kong made her envious.
'You and most of your neighbours are bursting at the seams with young consumers, for whom the world is just one big shopping mall,' she said.
'If you want to reach today's young people, you have to address them in their native tongue. Right now that means the language of MTV.' She said there were five main interests and 'drives' shared by children the world over - things which had helped to shape the agency's advertising strategies.