College marketers are accustomed to putting their prospects under a microscope and taking them apart with market research. Imagine looking through the lens of the finely tuned instrument of demographic examination and seeing the eye of a blazing intellect staring right back at you?

Imagine a rising high school senior who not only researches colleges but also examines how college marketing works, takes a peak into our blogs and resources, and journals about it to share with others?

That is precisely what Sam Jackson of Phillips Exeter Academy is doing. I think it’s brilliant.

Why am I reading something most intended for college administrators and web marketers? Because simply put, I’m one of those people being marketed to (prospective students), and it pays to be savvy.

Damn. How do you like them apples all you wanna-be evil masterminds of marketing? Reminds me that the guy who founded TheU did it in college because he wanted to help all the kids who came in and experienced a kind of crash when the school didn’t live up to the hype.

Authenticity means honesty folks. This is a generation that sees through marketing spin as if it were so much gauzy silk drapery.

[As a totally unrelated aside, I just learned today that I missed Generation X bv a hair. I'm a member of Generation Y / Generation Next. At least I missed Howe and Stauss's classification of "Millennials" by three years, so I don't have to stop using 'they' and 'them' in favor of 'we' and 'us' when wielding my favorite demographic term. ]

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 17th, 2006 at 8:43 pm and is filed under Feature: Market Moment, Features, Higher Education. It has been viewed 2399 times. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

From ‘A Softer World’

There is an argument made against privacy that says someone who isn’t engaged in criminal behavior has nothing to hide. This method of thinking allowed the US government to slowly sap away our civil liberties in the wake of the 9/11 attacks–many have just accepted that trading privacy for security is acceptable and used the “nothing to hide” argument to rationalize what was, essentially, a decision based on fear. However, limiting the government’s ability to intrude in our private lives is easy compared with attempting to control how personal information spreads on the internet via gossip. Rather than spies or wiretaps, gossip is often gathered by those we trust and spread online by people who don’t understand or appreciate the potential for the damage it can do. In reality, privacy is about much more than concealing wrongdoing.

Internet-based abuse (‘cyberbullying’) and privacy / relationship issues are still massively misunderstood. The complexities of online sociality are probably the biggest ‘generational divide’ between modern teens and adults. To help put it in perspective a bit, here are some numbers…

I HAVE A MYSPACE ACCOUNT!!1!