47/mr. youth

If 30 is the new 20, 40 the new 30 and so on, then Mr. Youth should be able to keep its name indefinitely. Right now, the seven-year-old agency specializes in reaching both teens and millennials 14 to 29 in the ways they want to be reached: with viral marketing over social networks and on campuses. It uses both specific campaigns and a word-of-mouth platform called RepNation, and has more than 100,000 brand ambassadors in the young-adult demographic.

The agency espouses a strategy it’s dubbed “social interactive”: i.e., using digital channels but making sure that the campaigns run on them are, at their core, social, connecting customers to one another.

For example, a 2008 campaign for Johnson & Johnson’s Neutrogena facial scrubber “The Wave” used a Facebook application that persuaded users and their friends to go to the product Web site, download a coupon and spread the message. High schoolers who enrolled the largest number of users won a free concert at their school by teen band Boys Like Girls. And according to the agency, 25% of the nation’s high schools were represented in the contest.

The timing is right for this social interactive approach, says Mr. Youth CEO Matt Britton, because brands that once overlooked return on investment are now demanding it.

“[Brands] were a little looser with a dollar, and were willing to do an experiential marketing tour without much concern about data capture or tracking of sales,” he says. “The majority of companies now need to have a direct-response component.”

Most recently, Mr. Youth has contributed to an ongoing campaign from Pepperidge Farm called “Fishful Thinking,” offering online resources for raising children to adopt a positive outlook.

Mr. Youth organized 1,000 moms already engaged with the campaign into a network. They were given a range of digital assets to share in their blogs, on Twitter or on their Facebook pages. Member mothers could create a digital Storybook that let them depict an optimistic example from their own child’s life and share it with others. They were also given physical assets that they could distribute in real-world settings from home meetings to play dates.

PROMO 100 SPOTLIGHT: Interactive

TOP 10

*Revenue estimated by Promo