Understand Digital Natives – your future customers. Introduction to the EiG keynote by John Palfrey, Author of Born Digital

16/09/11

Born Digital by Nick Garner, Head of Search, Unibet, in advance of the EiG keynote by John Palfrey, Author of Born Digital. Understanding the First Generation of Digital Natives (21 September 2011, Milan) www.eigexpo.com

EIG Milan’s keynote speaker is John Palfrey, co-author of ‘Born Digital’, an important book about ‘Digital Natives’ i.e. those born after about 1980.

The main theses of Born Digital:
•    The desire to post personal information
•    The dangers of lifelong "dossiers" of medical, legal, and purchase data
•    The problems of children viewing obscene and violent content
•    Copyright violations and copyright holder over-reactions
•    Online harassment and stalking
•    Young people's predilection toward sampling content, whether in music, news, or education
•    Information overload
•    The urge to create and to collaborate (a wealth largely untapped by educators)
•    Online political activism (pursued by only a small group of youth, but a growing and important group)


Initially this would not appear to have much to do with iGaming, but when you dig in deeper into the root theme of this book; digital literacy, you can see how this has fundamental implications with our whole industry.  

There is one statistic that demonstrates how seriously we should take the ‘born digital’ generation:
“The European online gaming sector accounted for around 7% of the total European gaming market in 2008. Independent forecasts expect online gaming’s market share to rise to 12% in 2012.” (http://www.egba.eu/pdf/EGBA_FS_MarketReality.pdf)

This means iGaming is in its infancy. It means there are emerging generations of individuals won’t understand the strange concept of transporting their bodies to a building so they can place a bet on odds far inferior to an iGaming website.

iGaming will grow, as these ‘born digital’ citizens emerge as adult consumers and our greatest challenge is to give what the ‘born digital’ want.

If we assume the ‘born digital’ began life from about 1980, then by the emergence of the Internet as a commercial proposition (and thus iGaming in 1997), they were 17 years old.
By the time they were 24, broadband was widely available and now in their 30’s they are our core demographic. But bear in mind, these are people who remember a time before the internet.

The deeply native ‘born digital’ is perhaps someone who grew up in a time of unlimited internet access from the age of about 3. They will now be 12 years old. By the time they become adult consumers at 21, our industry will probably be utterly different from where it is now.

Apart from the on-site changes that will emerge with the event of ‘web 3.0’ and more effective CRM, the other immediate to-do is marketing.

The notion of digital literacy is often underestimated by marketeers. As a community we think of conversion rates, tracking and relatively simple metrics that allow us to validate return on investment on our activities. Without these simple confirmations of success, we would not win  budgets and our marketing wheel would stop going around.
One of the challenges we now face is building solid business cases around the behaviours of the ‘born digital’ i.e. operators positively affecting online word of mouth and other online influence touchpoints which we typically have no useful data on.

Another challenge is the growing awareness of online consumers. In the early days, users were relatively easy to convert off the back of a pitch like ‘Free $500 bonus’. For Instance in pay per click (PPC) marketing we could often see a 30% difference in conversion rates between Bing and Google, Bing achieving higher conversions.

We assumed Bing users on Internet Explorer 6 and below were less web literate because they could not change either their browser or default search engine to something better. Poorer online literacy meant less understanding of the proposition and less ability to find a more suitable offer.

But now the Internet is ‘first nature’ to a growing block of consumers. i.e. instinctive, rather than learnt. Therefore if we assume ‘markets are conversations’ ( http://www.cluetrain.com/ )  those ‘born digital’ understand the subtle signals evidenced in conversations online about brands. They sense the differences and benefits between one operator and another, driving up consumer expectation and weeding out poor consumer offerings.

This understanding of what to look for, where to go and how to feedback to others online has driven the emergence of what Google call the Zero Moment of Truth. It is a marketing game changer and is only here because of how the ‘born digital’ natively communicate and feedback on the online space.

ZMOT sits second, in four buying steps:
•    Brand Stumulus: TV, Radio, Newspapers, Online Banners, Social Media.
•    Zero Moment of Truth: The research phase that about 84% of online go through when buying products and services online. Users reference on average 10.4 sources of information to help form an opinion that takes them to the next step
•    First Moment of Truth: The checkout, the cart
•    Second Moment of Truth: Evaluation and feedback.

ZMOT is primary example of how online behaviour is changing and affecting the buying decisions of millions. It has only happened because of the natural behavioural inclinations of the ‘born digital’.

The ‘Born Digital’ book gives us all a wake up call to who is coming and what affects them. When iGaming brands intuitively understand this emergent group, they will probably thrive in the decades to come.

END