In Shift, Youths Teach Old Pros about Ads

Younger people spend more time online than watching television, have access to millions of on-demand content channels and are fueling a boom in video gaming, an industry that is bigger in terms of sales than Hollywood's box office.

As some media executives note, who needs Hollywood when almost every teenager carries a personalized film studio in a phone in their back pocket?

"The people coming into and out of college don't look at things in terms of media or marketing. They look at what is cool," said James Hilton, co-founder and executive creative director of advertising consultancy Akqa.

This was borne out at the Cannes' Advertising festival earlier this month, where thousands of advertising executives met to brainstorm on the next big idea.

Akqa held a creative competition at the festival inviting young talent to draft an ad campaign using tools not available five years ago.

Art director Todd Parker, 27, and copywriter Peter Trueblood, 26, picked up joint trophies for an Earth Day campaign using 3-D City-making imaging and Google mapping to show the future impact of global warming.

Interacting with the campaign triggered snow falls on mountain peaks to symbolize how action makes a difference.

"Technologic advances, changing media landscape and the way messages are consumed has turned convention on its head," the two said in an e-mail response. "There are only two possible reactions to this -- terror or excitement. We choose both, we're terrified about how excited we are."

Some ideas that didn't make it to the winners' podium owed more to science fiction and looked to be a little beyond the grasp of contemporary thinking.

Try selling a campaign to an account manager that involves cheoptic holograms -- a way of using free-floating video or haptic sensory technology, eye-tracking or brain scans.