• by Rob Kendt , October 31, 2005

Internet-savvy 18- to 24-year-olds remain notoriously resistant to marketing. But Boston, Mass.-based Experience, Inc. has a new solution that may help marketers trying to crack this tough demographic. BrandExperience, a suite of integrated marketing services, can deliver advertising messages and resources directly to users of Experience.com, a popular job-search site for college students and recent grads.

With a Web-based recruiting platform currently encompassing more than 3,800 universities, 3 million registered candidates, and 100,000 employers, a foray into online ad services was a natural for Experience. BrandExperience has developed multiplatform capabilites and standardized its services to accommodate the needs of a wide variety of clients.

In addition to banner ads and e-mails, BrandExperience looks for interactive components. To promote Microsoft's Visual Basic program, BrandExperience designed a contest where students who downloaded the software used it to build Web sites. The winner landed an internship at a snowboarding company in New Zealand.

And Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism has applicants for a marketing internship create 50-second spots to pitch themselves. Richard Roth, senior associate dean at the Medill School, calls BrandExperience "a unique opportunity to get the attention of our target audience in a way that is far more effective than simply flashing an ad in front of them while they surf the Web." The key, says Experience's vice presdient of marketing, Janet Sun, is that the site's Internet-savvy users "don't feel like they're being spammed. We want them to feel, 'This is offering a service that is useful for me.'"