Euro RSCG Worldwide PR's Marian Salzman To Deliver Opening Keynote At Adweek's 'What Teens Want' Summit

NEW YORK, May 6 /PRNewswire/ -- Marian Salzman, president of Euro RSCG Worldwide PR, North America, has been announced as the opening keynote speaker at AdweekMedia's 12th-annual "What Teens Want" marketing conference on May 12 in New York. Salzman's presentation, "The Transformation of American Youth: From Teenager to Teenagent," will be a revolutionary examination of how today's teenagers interact with family, friends and brands, and what their value is in the contemporary marketing community.

"Teenhood is now a social place. It's almost as if the core definition of a teenager can no longer be negotiated by age but, rather, by the kind of actions and activities in his or her life," said Salzman. "Teenagers are agents of change, agents of communication and agents of innovation. Under our own noses, they have been transformed into something wholly new. And now, as American culture undergoes the digital-social revolution, they're about to emerge like never before."

Salzman, a recognized global trendspotter, is a bona fide expert on the subject of teens and their habits, particularly teenage girls. For more than 20 years, she has worked with them and helped marketers reach them. In the 1990s she worked with BKG Youth, which created a viewer feedback system for the in-school TV network Channel One, and she cast the real kids in Esprit's "What Would You Do to Change the World?" campaign. She organized focus groups for Levi's and AOL. She created the National Teen Summit for Clearasil, co-authored the Greetings from High School and Kids Online book series, and was a creative consultant on Pepsi's "It's Like This" campaign, which ran on MTV. In the early 2000s, as executive vice president and chief strategy officer of Euro RSCG Worldwide, she led the Euro RSCG Project Fishing Experience, which used real people for innovations creation and launched the Xplorer panels that gave the agency access to global youth.

This spring, after careful analysis of the findings from a study commissioned by Euro RSCG Worldwide PR that investigated the spending and communicating habits of teenage girls, Salzman founded The Sisterhood. A specialized agency within Euro RSCG Worldwide PR, The Sisterhood provides insight for brands and marketers seeking to understand and communicate with the teenage girl market. The initiative helps facilitate a trialogue, or a three-way conversation among teenage girls, brands and marketing professionals. Its website features a blog with posts by both teens and marketers, plus the white paper, "The Teenage Girl as Consumer and Communicator" (www.forsistersbysisters.com/).

Among other critical findings, the study found that:

• To keep in touch with friends, 78 percent of teen girls use social media.
• Another three-quarters are in "constant contact" with friends through texting, Facebook, iChat, AIM or other social media services.
• They want to approach a brand about promotions rather than vice versa. Almost 40 percent sign up for e-mails from favorite brands to do just that.
• When their favorite brand or store has a sale, 65 percent want to share that information with their best friend or sister.
• Shopping with her best friend or sister, a teen girl will spend 23 percent more money than when shopping with two or more friends.
• Shopping with a boy, she'll spend only 43 percent of what she spends with her close friend or sister.
• About 80 percent prefer one-to-one communication (texting or phone calls) over "broadcast" platforms such as Facebook and Twitter.
• More than half (59 percent) say maintaining a unique personal style is important to them—twice the number of girls who like to follow the same trends as their friends.
• Forty-three percent are influenced by the style of celebrities and just 26 percent by "cool" girls at school.

The "What Teens Want" summit is one of the foremost teen marketing conferences in the United States. It allows some of the industry's brightest marketing professionals, creative developers, and media and entertainment executives to gather and share new developments in teen-specific marketing and communications. For more information, go to www.adweekmedia.com/aw/events/whatteenswant/index.html.

About Euro RSCG Worldwide PR

Euro RSCG Worldwide PR is the public relations arm of Euro RSCG Worldwide, a leading integrated marketing communications agency with 233 offices in 75 countries. Euro RSCG Worldwide PR, North America, is headquartered in New York City, with offices in Chicago and Pittsburgh. It is part of Adweek's first-ever Healthcare Agency of the Year (2010) and Medical Marketing & Media's 2010 All-Star Network of the Year. The agency provides communications services, social brand momentum and thought leadership, among other services, in core areas ranging from CSR and health care to content creation and social media. Clients include Bayer Corp., Purina, sanofi-aventis, Toyota Motorsports, Transitions Optical and Yele Haiti. Euro RSCG Worldwide is the largest unit of Havas, a world leader in communications (Euronext: HAV.PA) (Paris: HAV.PA).

SOURCE Euro RSCG Worldwide PR