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At the recent IAB Engage conference, there was a lot of talk about whether digital consumers are different from other consumers.

One view, put forcefully by Procter & Gamble's Roisin Donnelly, is that
the digital consumer is not a different species that needs to be treated
in isolation. 'Online people are exactly the same as offline people,'
she said. 'We must adopt a consistent approach focusing on the
consumer.'

There are others who believe that digital changes the game.
Undercurrent's Josh Spear said that 'marketers are playing by an
entirely new set of rules in the web 2.0 landscape'.
So, does the fact that internet users also watch TV and read newspapers
make them the same as people who don't use the internet? And have the
rules really changed, or just the arena in which we apply them?
In 2001, US educational software designer Mark Prensky wrote an
influential paper called 'Digital natives, digital immigrants'. His
thesis was that people growing up today are immersed from an early age
in a digital way of life, and that this is changing the way they think
and develop mentally.

To Prensky, people who didn't grow up in this environment see the world
differently - and when they become immigrants to the digital world,
their newcomers' accent shows. Printing out email and bringing people
over to show them a website, instead of sending a link, are just two
ways in which a digital immigrant reveals his status.

I recognise this myself. As the sole digital person at a big agency some
years ago, I was asked by a creative team to make tapes of a website
and, despite protestations that this was missing the point, I had to sit
there surfing while a technician transferred the site to video.
Prensky's concern is as an educationalist. A generation with a heavy
immigrant accent is teaching digital natives, and their worlds are
incompatible - natives with their non-linear, multitasking,
instant-gratification culture, faced with people from a linear, focused
and longer-term world.

A variety of studies have demonstrated that kids multitask in a way that
their parents simply can't understand. The recent 'Kids' Leisure Time 2'
report found that two- to 12-year-olds spend a quarter of their leisure
time doing two or more activities at the same time. In 2006, a media
consumption study by KFF found that 21% of young people's media time was
spent multitasking, and that of those doing their homework on a
computer, 65% were doing something else at the same time.
It isn't just the ability to manipulate information that marks a digital
native out as different. A Gallup poll shows that only 15% of 13- to
17-year-olds think downloading music illegally is morally wrong.
Rushworth Kidder, at the Institute for Global Ethics, believes that
children think such activity is 'not like stealing, because nothing is
missing'.

So, there is lots of evidence that there are differences between those
who were 'born digital' and those who weren't. But they all eat crisps
and watch TV, don't they?
Perhaps. But, while on the surface some behaviours might look similar,
people's motivations and expectations of brands can be quite
different.

Modern consumers are less tolerant of being sold to, expect brands to be
ethically upstanding (while not always expecting the same of themselves)
and want to express themselves. They consume information differently in
a fast, non-linear, multitasking way, and are driven by instant and
frequent reward.

So, while a brand can remain 'true' only if it has a consistently
communicated proposition, it faces the challenge of executing that
communication in ways that are different at a fundamental level. And for
that, you need to speak like a native.

- Andrew Walmsley is co-founder of i-level

30 SECONDS ON ... YOUNG PEOPLE'S SLANG

- Kids keen to share their music collection like to biPod, which is when
the Apple device is listened to by more than one person at the same
time.
- Goths have given way to Emo boys and girls, who are still
characterised by a grungy look and taste for downbeat music.
- Facebook and MySpace are used as verbs to describe the action of
checking someone out on the social networking sites, as in 'I Facebooked
him', or 'you better MySpace me'.
- Something excellent or cool can be described as sick, dizzy or dope,
while the tedious is referred to as dry.
- A good-looking member of the opposite sex is peng; an ugly person is
butters (a derivation of the phrase 'butt ugly').
- Pimp has nothing to do with the oldest profession in the world, but is
a verb used to describe the improvement of something - see MTV's car
show Pimp My Ride.