• Advertising Age, Monday, July 17, 2006 1:02 PM

In an attempt to upgrade its coolness quotient for the back-to-school season, Wal-Mart is inviting teens (it calls them "hubsters") to create their own Web pages and submit videos for a chance to win a spot on a Wal-Mart commercial. The social-networking site "School Your Way" is an attempt to close the trend gap with Target. The retailer reserves the right to edit video content, and also gives parents veto power over submissions because Wal-Mart plans to e-mail the parents of every registered teen. Whether this highly sanitized corporate attempt at "we-media" is enough to overcome in-store issues is the real challenge, according to youth-marketing researcher Irma Zandl: "We have been getting increasingly bad feedback from teen girls--about Wal-Mart's apparent lack of cleanliness, messy layout, and lack of stylish attire."

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