The 18-to-24-year-old set is famously media-drenched, with high Internet and mobile phone usage. However, these young adults are not solidly opposed to brands themselves, and are willing to spread the word about the ones they like. That is one of the findings Synovate made in June and July of 2008 in its “Young Adults Revealed” study, released this month.

When asked about their online brand engagement in the past month, 28% of respondents had talked about a brand on a discussion forum, 23% had put brand-related content on their instant messaging (IM) profile, and 19% had added branded content to their homepage or social networking site.

Nearly one-half said they had clicked on online ads, and 18% had accessed brand and product information through a portal. Nearly one-quarter had uploaded ads to social networks and online video sites in the past month. -

Online branding
As Harvard Business School’s John Quelch mentions in , Obama picked up where Howard Dean left off. He leveraged his website, the blogosphere, and even user-generated content. But what if someone else was offering the same? Yeah I know he was the only one… In other words, did America elected Obama for what he has to offer or mainly because he was the only one coming up with ideas that were matching Americans hopes dreams.

It quickly becomes very interesting to consider that according to some, That we’ve been conditioned by search not to be brand loyal. We may check out Amazon.com for the MP3 Player, but we have no qualms about buying it elsewhere. So as far as branding indicates trust, we might sometimes overrate companies, products or services that show up first in popular search engines rankings. In fact, because of Google’s reliability history, we probably now value more a company regarding their rankings positions rather than their offline reputation. And while it might seem obvious to some… we now mainly rely on search engines to get the right information on brands.

So with all this information, am I the only one wondering why marketers are still waiting to bring their brands into the social media space? How long before the industry even consider SEO, SEM and SMO as effective marketing strategies? As for Obama, he already had proved that investing into internet marketing and online branding can definitely drive to results.

As seen today on their website, Bell is taking the Beijing Olympic Games kick-off as an opportunity to .

It didn’t take very long before a lot of people reacted to Bell’s move: there are already many very interesting comments in the feedback section of this . By reading some of these comments, such as ”Bell may be changing it’s names and ads, but if they don’t change their policies, it isn’t going to help them” or ”Changing brands doesn’t mean squat if they can’t improve their service offerings and customer support” or that one:” Improve your service and make the prices more reasonable and only then you can change the names to confuse the people”, the first thing that came up to my mind was this clip making fun of the whole advertising industry.

So you’re not selling the way you used to, maybe it’s time for a bigger logo, what about an extreme make over? , Bell’s brand senior vice president, the new visual representation of the brand was an attempt to “really clean things up.” I guess they’ll have to review this whole document ().

Sympatico got killed

So besides the new logo, Bell is getting rid of Bell Express Vu and Sympatico brands to renamed them Bell TV and Bell Internet. It took apparently four marketing agencies to find out these names and to process the upcoming campaign. I have to confess that I feel a bit sad losing Sympatico because even if I’m no Bell fan, I’ve always loved Sympatico. I probably still have 2-3 boxes with old modems that they sent me, each time coming with really nice softwares to install IE when the only thing I really needed was a username/password. I also think (not sure) that they used to send me a monthly magazine back in the mid ‘90 with helpful listings of websites to visit, that was nice from them. I finally remember their partnership with MSN, which was probably one of their best move ever (no Microsoft fan here but I still can recognize that it was smart). So, RIP Sympatico, I can’t wait to see the new Bell Internet ads and logo, any suggestions on the font they should use?