The recent UN International Youth Day celebrated the achievement and potential of youth around the world. Youth Day was especially poignant for Livity this year as we celebrated our fifteenth birthday.
Poignant because we launched to address fundamental questions including ‘is ethical marketing an oxymoron?’ and ‘Can an agency bring benefit to the lives of young people by harnessing the power of brands?’
Fifteen years on, at the intersection of marketing, youth, purpose, brands and innovation, we’ve learned not only answers to those questions but a whole lot more. With all this in mind, we thought we’d share the top 15 things we know now about working with youth that we wish we’d known then:
1 Viewing young people as anything other than talent is a great mistake. Every day, young people are systematically deprived of the opportunity to realise their potential, in a criminal, uneconomical waste of precious youth that costs us more than we know.
2 Never underestimate the power of not knowing what you’re doing. When naivety meets wisdom head on with open ears and self-awareness, magic happens.
3 Young people have stopped looking up for their role models and are increasingly looking sideways, to their peers, it’s a move that holds lessons for us all.
4 Innovation takes place at the edges. Learning by sharing space with young people every day is the secret.
5 Aim to transform lives. To be called a ‘transformation engine’ by two young men who worked at Livity is the best award we’ve ever received.
6 Innovate faster than others can imitate.
7 When it comes to co-creating, people will usually give the ‘right answer’, the one you want to hear. What’s much more important is to find out the real answer. But the only route to real answers is trust.
8 If you never feel out of your depth, you’re probably not doing the right job.
9 Working with young people is inspiring and enlightening. When they get into Harvard, the UN, become brain surgeons and astronauts, and thank you, it’s mind-boggling.
10 We’ve reached an inflexion point in learning. Digital disruption is changing future careers at such a pace that no educational institution can compete - the only people that can are young, yet it’s still teachers teaching young people. The tables need to turn before education goes bankrupt.
11 A sense of purposeful confidence is the single biggest determinant of young people getting into work. Above everything.
12 Audience is the best discipline. When it comes to young people trends, technology and techniques are important, but deeply understanding audience comes first.
13 Mentoring is mutual in its value. But when done well the mentor learns more.
14 Young people have to learn a global, creative, collaborative language to succeed in a digitally connected future. To our minds, they already have. If you overlook emojis, Instagram, Snapchat and gifs as a visual form of slang, you’re missing out on a new language more nuanced than any you were taught and the foundations for the global language of the future.
15 If you want to create trustworthiness and responsibility in young people, in a way that is effective 99.9% of the time, give them true trust and real responsibility.
If there’s one overriding principle we’ve learned it’s that a young audience is your responsibility, not just your opportunity. Treat them accordingly and they’ll treat you with equal respect and loyalty.
Sam Conniff and Michelle Morgan are the co-founders and CEOs of Livity
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