Writing for The Media Leader, research and insight director Heather Dansie explores Britain’s diverse young news readership and gives a glimpse of how the advertising industry might compare
Highlighting a high and varied news readership among young Brits, Dansie explains how Newsworks’ ‘Youth’ research warns the ad industry not to treat the demographic as a monolith: “When it comes to young people’s news habits, there’s no one-size-fits-all approach.”
She goes on to describe the five reader archetypes analysis of 1000 young Brits’ passive internet browsing data uncovered: ‘Meme Me’, ‘Personal Puzzlers’, Who Scored’, ‘Have You Got News for Me?’ and ‘Catch Me If You Can’.
For a bit of fun, Newsworks created a personality quiz that allows readers of the research to find out which archetype their reading habits most fit under. While the results needed to be taken with a pinch of salt, ad industry respondents were most likely to be categorised under ‘Personal Puzzlers’, whereas the study found ‘Meme Me’ as the biggest cohort among the young readers.
While praising the industry for being thoughtful and curious, Dansie warns the industry not to keep themselves in a bubble: “In our interest to understand how others behave, we must always keep our own personal biases in check.
“In fact, 80% of the next generation’s news readers are not as interested, shocked or necessarily amused by the same news stories that we in adland clearly are.”
Read Heather Dansie’s full comment piece on The Media Leader.
