Give me a mountain with nothing to do. Give a pager to a kid with nothing to do and what will he do with it?
Last week MobileComm and PepsiCo announced a program to distribute half a million pagers to young Americans to create the “Mountain Dew Extreme Network.” For $30 and several proofs of purchase, consumers will receive a Motorola Inc. numeric pager and six months of airtime. The pager will facilitate normal messaging and allow members of the Extreme Network to receive special messages. When a participant is beeped and calls the toll-free number displayed he will receive news information from a celebrity or notification of a special promotion or contest. The Extreme Network begins July 4th weekend.
The contests and promotions allow brand marketing to a highly focused group-teens and young adults-through an unprecedented venue. It is a marketer’s dream promotion and numerous companies including MTV, Pizza Hut, Timex and Universal Studios have signed up.
It is a dream promotion that is raising eyebrows across the country. The companies have said that parental consent is required before young people are eligible for the program, but a larger issue is that in some states, local laws prohibit the use of pagers by high school students on school property. Apparently the special messages will be sent only after the school day has ended, but a kid with a pager is going to be wanting to send and receive messages whatever time of the day it is.
My nineteen-year-old younger brother recently started carrying a pager. He is a good kid. He is a full-time student and works about 30 hours per week as a lifeguard. He carries the pager mostly to keep in touch with his girlfriend-since he is never home, he is difficult to reach. His reasons make sense to me yet when he told me he was going to buy one I winced a little. I know that my connection to the industry helped spark his interest, and I did encourage the purchase, but the image of teenage drug dealers carrying pagers still crossed my mind when he bought it.
Teenage Research Unlimited has reported that pagers represent the largest growth opportunity among teens for any item, and statistics show that more than 10 percent of all teens currently use pagers. I wonder how many of them are like my brother.
MobileComm executives have said that the program is an “innovative way to inform young adults of the benefits of wireless communications.”
I guess it could be a good way to clean up the image of why young people might want to have and use pagers. Hopefully it won’t cause disruption in schools or lead to kids stealing each other’s pagers and other mischievous activities.
