Walking towards Fumbally Sq, one of the capital’s main creative and social hubs, there was a palpable sense of vibrancy. Fashionable people walked briskly, while others sat down to meet over Instagram picture perfect lunches. Even Paul Galvin was in on this place, the GAA player briefly chatted to friends before quickly proceeding to run down the laneway to his other engagements, as I made my way to mine. The contrast of young workers and modern enterprise next to deteriorating buildings and narrow laneways gives the impression that the area is currently undergoing a process of renewal – one of Dublin’s earliest suburbs is becoming the newest hotspot for the capital’s leading young companies. Just opposite us is Her.ie and Joe.ie, I was told, with Fumbally Sq itself being the home to Thinkhouse – the Youth Marketing Agency. Indeed, there could be no better place to meet with Creative Director of Thinkhouse, Dave Byrne, as well as Insights Manager of the company’s Youth Lab, Niamh Murphy, than in their offices.
Thinkhouse is a full-service marketing agency, specialising in the young persons’ demographic. The agency, founded 15 years ago by its Managing Director, Jane McDaid, began as a PR agency and over the last decade and a half has expanded to much more. They produce anything from “social media, content, campaigns, insights, trends and absolutely anything that caters for a youth audience”, Byrne tells me. They have also developed an international appendage to the company, now with offices in London. Advertising expert insights into people aged 18 to 35, they offer brands the ability to reach this ever-evolving and complex target audience.
The motivation behind the founding of Thinkhouse, and indeed a reason for its longevity since then, is the deep-seated enthusiasm for and belief in the capabilities of young people, something that runs through every aspect of the company. For Byrne: “Young people are the most important people on the planet. Young people change the world.” He adds that nowadays, more than ever, young people can influence the world around them and that “they now have the tools to make themselves famous on their own terms and their own way”.
The room was rich in decor, the walls plastered with cowhide, which was riveted to the far wall. We sat communally over a tree bark, french-polished and repurposed as a bench, adding to the character of the studio-like meeting-room.
This, it seems, is an exciting sphere to enter professionally: “I just think the youth audience and the youth market is the most exciting market to work in and always has been throughout the ages. And I think now, with so much going on in youth culture, and everybody being able to be connected all over the world, it just makes it a really interesting space to play in.” This sentiment is carried even into their employment practices, with Byrne adding: “I mean, if you look at our office, it is all young people that work here. If you are marketing to young people, and you are doing an event at a festival or you’re doing a video for social media, who’s best to troubleshoot it than people you are going to market to? So when you walk through Thinkhouse, it’s not like walking through another agency. It feels young, it feels a bit crazy and that’s how we like it.” At this point I began to notice the surroundings in which the interview was taking place. The room was rich in decor, the walls plastered with cowhide, which was riveted to the far wall. We sat communally over a tree bark, french-polished and repurposed as a bench, adding to the character of the studio-like meeting-room. Through a large pane of glass, which separated us from the office itself, this young energy became apparent. The open plan of the office allows the Thinkhouse employees to chat and interact with one another and for the free movement of ideas. This office structure, it appears, is purposeful: “It’s all about collaboration because I think the more you work together as a team the more people will see your work and usually the better the work is”, Byrne asserts.
The Youth Lab is a crucial aspect of the work that they do at Thinkhouse as it allows them to gain a valuable grasp of the audience that they are trying to capture. This may be in relation to “cultures, habits, behaviours, beliefs and passions” according to their website. Murphy, as the company’s Insights Manager, is in charge of consumer research. The main task is, she explains, “to understand game changing insights that they can use to inform strategy and creative teams” when developing targeted brand campaigns. “I think it’s hugely important in actually trying to gain an understanding of young people from a young person’s perspective as well. A lot of times when people are trying to understand what youth culture is it can be a bit of an echo chamber, unless you’re actually engaging young people themselves to get an understanding of them”, she says, “because in many ways they are the experts themselves. So that’s definitely the approach that we would always take.” Their data is collected through surveys or even qualitatively through what they call the Love Network. This is an always-expanding group of young people aged 18 to 35 whose opinions they value and often return to for their input on various topics and issues. The results of their findings get published in what is called the Youth Culture Report, which is a report on the state of youth culture in Ireland, the UK and globally. The next report should be released in late October and is sure to inform their future brand campaigns.
I think youth is definitely a feeling as well. If someone in their 50s, which happens a lot, likes our campaigns, brilliant. If you’re a 50 year old, and you feel like an 18 year old, more power to you. Youth is youth.
With their list of clients ranging from Heineken to Coca-Cola, Barry’s Tea, eBay and Unilever, they give their brands youth-driven advertising, powered and informed by the Youth Lab and delivered by their strategy and creative teams. This can materialise in the form of online content, events, campaigns, videos or music, the goal being “to get young people talking about our work in a way that matters”. One example of a success story of theirs is the Tullamore DEW #BestMen campaign. They began by setting out to understand the cultural significance of the “best man” in order to sufficiently market this product not just in Ireland, but the US and Canada, as well as Germany and Slovakia. The Youth Lab uncovered trends and insights, which allowed them to tap into the sentiments of a man’s best friend – emotional response is often the hook of any successful advertisement – surveying 1,200 men in their late 20s and early 30s, across six markets. The Youth Lab came back with statistics, which included “49 per cent of respondents agreed that sharing a glass of whiskey ‘before the service’ makes for a memorable moment”. The campaign reached 7,413,100 people, with video impressions well above 60 million.
As the Youth Marketing Agency advertise expertise into young people aged between 18 to 35, this is an interesting scope in terms of the span of time for which one is considered “young”, especially given the fact that the UN’s definition of youth only goes as far as age 24. I ask them if they think that “youth” as a life stage is becoming prolonged, to which Murphy replies: “Absolutely. A lot of the time I’m reading about this kind of idea of delayed adulthood, and this idea of adolescence being constantly stretched out … I think when people are so driven by their individual desires now that there isn’t this linear approach to being an adult, it has delayed settling down in a way much more so than ever before”. They expressed a very liberal approach to their definition of youth also, with Byrne adding that “age is just a number. I think youth is definitely a feeling as well. If someone in their 50s, which happens a lot, likes our campaigns, brilliant. If you’re a 50 year old, and you feel like an 18 year old, more power to you. Youth is youth”. Murphy adds to this, saying: “I think that’s why it has to be so broad … youth is such a complex landscape in many ways, and there is so many different areas of specialties within it. We try to look across the broad range of it. So it is much more than a singular category in our eyes.”
This approach to young people comes as a refreshing change of tone, although I am not surprised that an agency dedicated to exploring young people would adopt this thinking. We are all too familiar, as young people, with the presence of negative stereotypes that affect our daily lives and stereotypes that are pushed onto our social media pages regularly. One of the most common manifestations of this are the headlines pertaining to the attributes of “millennials”, attributes that may or may not even characterise us at all. One such headline from the Irish Times read “Why is it taking so long for 20-somethings to grow up?” accompanied with the subheading “Young people are eschewing the traditional milestones of adulthood – in favour of relying on their parents”. A patronising and unwelcome jab at an often vulnerable group, less certain of their future than the generation before them. This resulted in much antagonism online in an attempt to repute this view and the opinions of many pieces like it.
At Thinkhouse, they don’t use the term “millennials”: “We actually hate the term millennials, and we never use it. In fact, we ban all marketing jargon in here … what we are passionate about is not typecasting young people into one cohort. And saying every young person is a millennial is completely wrong. Young people are much more than that. And I think with Thinkhouse we know what young people are and what they stand for.” Byrne adds that this is apparent in “not just the work we do with brands but the work we do with youth culture around the world”. He is of course referring to their involvement with the Yes Equality campaign last year, an event that had a monumental effect on Ireland’s young demographic: “The Yes Equality vote was an absolute game changer for Irish society. I think it gave the power to people … it made young people feel that they had a voice and that they could change the world.” Thinkhouse proudly supported the cause, one which meant a lot to Ireland’s young people, not just to those identifying as LGBT: “We obviously pushed that as much as we could. We had a huge party in the office and 1,000 people turned up, Sky News turned up, and that’s because we knew that this is a hugely important issue for young people … there was no brand involvement, but that’s what we felt and that’s how we wanted to act. I think [if you are] an agency understanding the needs of young people across all spectrums, then you’re not going to be defining them as a ‘millennial’.”
We ban all marketing jargon in here … what we are passionate about is not typecasting young people into one cohort. And saying every young person is a millennial is completely wrong. Young people are much more than that.
This leads on to a discussion on the engagement of the younger generation with politics, which Murphy sheds some light on, based on her Youth Lab insights: “Socially, [young people] are very engaged, when it comes to the political landscape … they really want to care about politics, but a lot of the time they don’t feel that politics make it very easy for them to get involved.” The Repeal Project serves as a perfect example of how the political engagement of young people can work, a movement made accessible through wearable expressions of solidarity with the Repeal Project, through the Hunreal Issues or even “James Kavanagh going on snapchat, talking about it in a way that’s relevant to a younger audience … he’ll recruit loads of people”, Byrne adds. This political responsibility is something that Thinkhouse very much nurture, inviting Andrea Horan of the Hunreal Issues to speak at one of their Insights and Trends Breakfast where they “talk about how brands need to stand for a higher purpose and commit. Horan was talking about the Hunreal Issues and how that kind of bite-sized content really was able to inform people and also gave them something to share, to help inform their network as well”. This is something that is important to keep in mind when considering the changing landscape of how young people get their information. Murphy adds that “politics in many ways needs to actually understand that they need to play a role and to be there to inform [young people]”, perhaps suggesting that politicians and political parties could benefit in adopting a similar ethos to that of Thinkhouse, along with their Youth Culture Reports and their strategies that have been usually reserved for brands.
This message of understanding young people across all spectrums is a clear theme for their online magazine, now in their third issue, plainly entitled “Youth”. The online editorial team pinpoint people doing interesting things within global youth culture and feature them on their website. Each story is a celebration of individuality and a showcase of the talent and innovation that can arise from young people. One such story explores the subject matter of gender norms, body confidence and the LGBTQ community through their interview and short film with androgynous model, Ivan Fahy. The video, once posted online, was picked up by a flood of media outlets like Upworthy and Pride.com, garnered over 1 million views. Other stories, as Byrne outlines, include “something as simple as a feature piece which we did on grime … we interviewed the guys who run GirlCrew. They are the crew who basically set up Tinder for girls that can basically be friends as opposed to hookups, or it can be picture led”, going on to describe a group in South Africa that build large stereos at campsites at festivals, which attracted huge amounts of coverage. “It’s shining a light on these amazing stories from these amazing people all over the world. And as an agency that believes in young people, what better way to do it then to celebrate their work”. For the staff at Thinkhouse, however, this idea is not radical nor is it being particularly open-minded. Byrne expresses this when saying that what they do is not “an open-minded approach. I just think it is the approach, that’s what you should be, you know? We’re not going in thinking that a young person is ‘so crazy’. That’s just who you are”.
In a recent survey, the Youth Lab found that 71 per cent of young people did not feel that the media paints an accurate picture of their generation.
Refraining from putting young people in strictly rigid boxes and treating each person as an individual is perhaps why what they do at Thinkhouse cannot be so easily defined – their methods cannot be regimented and what they do is ever-evolving. Byrne explains: “In terms of work, I think it changes all the time. One month everybody loves Snapchat, the next month it’s completely different. One month it’s an influencer, one month it’s not. So it does change all the time. That for me is the most exciting thing about working at Thinkhouse because it’s never stale. In fact every three months I feel like I work in a whole new market … that’s why it’s so great to have the Youth Lab because they are so on top of this, they can pull up these insights and pull up these trends that mean we can keep our brands very much aligned with what’s happening within youth culture so they can stay connected in a credible way.”
In a recent survey, the Youth Lab found that “71 per cent of young people did not feel that the media paints an accurate picture of their generation”. This is apparent in the articles outlined before, or with regard to, the RTÉ series called Young, Dumb and Dangerous, which gave a sensationalised account of the rise in violent crime among young people and documented “feral youth” to popular viewership. “For us as an agency, I don’t think the media portrays young people accurately. But that gives brands then an opportunity to give young people an opportunity to be themselves or do what they want to do. And for us as a youth agency to be able to get that back is mind blowing.” For Byrne, the accurate representation of young people is something that can be achieved through Thinkhouse’s work, an agency that seeks to understand youth in its many forms and offer a realist account of it for the brands that they market for. This is an interesting evolution in the public sphere where it is not the media giving an honest account of the lived experiences of Ireland’s young population, but instead it is our billboards, Youtube commercials and sponsored posts, something that traditionally gave the impression of an unrealistic ideal, now grounded in narratives backed by evidence. An example of this at Thinkhouse is the Movember campaign, where Byrne highlights that they “have always worked with diverse groups of people to talk about men’s health. You don’t just have to be a famous rugby player. You can be a surfer, you can be a chef, you can be whatever you want to be. But we’ll give people the platform to showcase who they are”. A platform that many young people, I’m sure, are very grateful for – even if we’re “always glued to our phones”.
