Tellabs 'Echo Boomers' theme resonates with Telstra

Stuart Corner
Sunday, 02 April 2006 07:46

IT Industry - Strategy

In its bid to win Telstra's business Tellabs undertook a high profied advertising campaign centred around 'echo boomers'.

Australian advertising industry newspaper, B&T, reported last month Tellabs was trying to "establish itself in the Australian market with a novel outdoor advertising campaign," targeted at Telstra.

"For 10 months now, the employees of Telstra HQ in the centre of Melbourne have been greeted with a billboard telling them they'd better know who the 'Echo Boomers' are, because they're coming and they need bandwidth," B&T said.

It quoted Tellabs Europe and Asia Pacific marketing communications manager, Sonny Waheed, saying: "As a new entrant to the market we didn't have the brand recognition of other companies, or the millions of dollars...We wanted to take ownership of [the Echo Boomer] term which would be taken on in society as a whole."

According to B&T, "the Echo Boomers, or the children of Baby Boomers, are the new wave of consumers who have grown up with computers and the internet and are pioneering the use of podcasts, video on demand and internet protocol television."

According to lexicographic website, www.worldwidewords.org, the term is thought to have first hit the public gaze in an article in Time in 1995.

"Echo boomers were born between the late 1970s and the early 1990s. They're mostly the children of Baby Boomers (so, an echo of them, hence the name) and their oldest members are now moving into adulthood. They have been stereotyped as ethnically diverse children of the computer age, conformist, and untroubled by the generation gap. This group is large (three times that of the preceding Generation X) and is posing demographic problems, especially in education. The group is known by several other names—as the Millennial Generation (or the Millennials) and as Generation Y (or Gen Y, with individuals being Gen Yers). But the terminology is muddled, with Generation Y—as you might expect—being limited by some to the children of Generation X parents, or those born after about 1983. (And Generation X itself is actually a comparatively recent term, being popularised only by Douglas Coupland's book of that title of 1991.)"