Dissertation - Revisited (new media)

Right, so after the disseratation tutorial here are some revised notes on the future of my thesis:

The general theory of the paper will follow the theme that

In relation to the British youth market (16-24 yr olds), the presence of traditional media is gone and those campaigns that have been most succesful at reaching this demographic have been those that utilize new media.

This demographic is known as one of the hardest markets to reach for PR professionals, yet some viral internet campaigns have such a colossal success rate with such a simple idea that it makes one think; is there a formula for a succesful new media campaign?

Succesful campaigns will be compared to those that have just flopped. The idea that there is a room full of 35-50 year old men trying to figure out how to make a "oool" and trendy campaign is quite amusing. One example of an online campaign that flopped was for movie Snakes On A Plane.
There was a program on their website where users could enter their or a friend's name to have a personalized audo viral message sent to someone spoken by Samuel L. Jackson.



Now inititally, the youth market really took to this idea (it has proved succesful with similar programs launched by THE RING film). However, it was soon dismissed because of a simple and quite offensive glitch. The programmers did not take into account foreign names! The program could say JOHN and TOM and LISA but could not say anything remotley foreign. One blogger in the US went to the Social Security Administration's website and chose names from the 50 Most Common Names list available. Any name that was "ethnic sounding" failed. Who were these PR professionals hoping to reach???

Sometimes I wonder if people ever really understand what 20somethings really want.