A team of agency leaders beat their more junior industry colleagues in the News Generations quiz held as part of Newsworks‘ launch event for its Youth research event last week.
The event, which took place at London’s Eastcheap Records, kicked off with Newsworks busting myths that young people (15-29) aren’t interested in news. For instance that nine in 10 young people consume news, while 72% engage with news brands on a regular basis – checking on average six news items a day.
The News Generations quiz, hosted by comedian Laura Smyth saw two teams compete in front of an audience of agencies and publishers.
The Rising Stars team featured Hannah Chittenden, Account Manager, Zenith; Ailish Duddy, Director, Client Leadership, GroupM Nexus; and Ruby Hann, Broadcast Executive, Total Media.
The faced the Agency Leaders team which featured Dino Myers-Lamptey, Founder, The Barber Shop; Laurie O’Riordan, Head of Programmatic, Digitas UK; and Adam Foley, CEO, of Bountiful Cow.
The close-fought contest saw the Agency Leaders team emerge victorious.
Rupert Smith, Director of Communications, Newsworks, said: “Our youth research found young people to be engaged with news content and our launch event helped spread this message further to the media agency community.
“The News Generations quiz was a fun way to further engage with this important audience, with teams made up of some of our industry’s top agency leaders and representatives of a new generation of talent. But this was just the start – over the coming months we’ll be taking our youth findings to agencies in a fun and insightful way.”
Adam Foley said: “The myth that people under the age of 30 don’t care about news is easily dispelled whenever you talk to young people. In fact, I’d say they are the most politically engaged generation for forty years. It was great to see that confirmed in Newsworks latest research.
“It’s now incumbent on us as advertisers to commit to supporting journalism at a time when it has never been more important.”
Newswork’s Youth research included analysis of six million clicks made by 1,000 nationally representative young people across every website and every app they used in one month. The results revealed that the 1000 young people in our sample spent over seven million seconds – 117,007 minutes, 20,000 hours or 81 days – reading the news.
Importantly for advertisers, the clickstream analysis also captured every instance where reading the news was immediately followed up with related online retail activity, providing compelling evidence of how news brands influence online buying decisions.
