Pat's online experience is not unusual.
The Internet provides teens with easy access to adult material. Sometimes kids access this material from teen environments containing adult-oriented links and activities; in other instances, adult-oriented sites actively target teens and send them on to blatantly adult, pornographic sites. As we saw from Pat's experience, warnings like "you must be 19 or older to enter" are easy to bypass.
While it is difficult to say whether the site visited by Pat is a teen- or adult-oriented site, one thing is sure: the rock band Rave and the strategies used to promote their concert tour could certainly appeal to young teens as well as young adults.
In addition to cross-marketing with other corporate interests (in this case, a beer company), the Rave site incorporates a number of online marketing strategies designed to appeal to young people. They include:
- Glorification of youth culture: hip language, humour and goodies such as downloadable audio clips, profiles of young celebrities, and hyped-up information about company-sponsored music and sports events.
- "Bells and whistles": bold graphics and animation; interactive games; contests; and branded merchandise, such as promotional screen savers, tee-shirts, and e-mail postcards to send to friends. (E-mail postcards are a particularly useful means for companies to attract new potential customers to add to their e-mail databases.)
- Collection of personal information: Through questionnaires and surveys, companies gather and use personal information to create individualized messages, develop site content, and facilitate site promotion through return e-mail. This information is sometimes sold to third parties.
- Chat rooms and message boards: These are used to create in-your-face, hip, virtual communities. Some companies even have programmed personalities (i.e., Rave's lead guitarist, Radical) that enliven the talk or engage visitors in personal discussion. They sometimes even weave product talk into the chat room discussion.
