Posted January 2, 200718 yr Marketing Elvis difficult sell to today's youth Teenagers in the 1950s and '60s went wild over Elvis Presley, much to the consternation of their parents, but kids in the new millennium aren't so stirred by rock 'n' roll's original rebel. "I can't try to sell somebody Elvis who doesn't know who he is . . . that he's not just some guy who's been gone for 30 years," said Paul Jankowski, chief of marketing for Elvis Presley Enterprises Inc. Next year, three decades after Presley's death, the multimillion-dollar Elvis business will try to connect with a new generation of teenage fans. "Our opportunity demographic is really going to be 12 to 34 (years old), with a sweet spot around the 18-24 area," Jankowski said. Early in Presley's career, teenagers gathered at jukeboxes or around turntables. But now the music has moved to the Internet, on sites like MySpace and YouTube. Next year more film clips, photos and other material from the vast Presley archives will be showing up online. "We will take our My-Space page and we will focus on expanding our number of friends on My-Space, that kind of thing," Jankowski said. "There's all kinds of Elvis content on YouTube, things that we put up, things that fans put up." MySpace is a social-networking site that lets visitors share photos and personal web pages. YouTube lets users post and share videos. Moving Elvis content online should be easy; making Elvis cool again will be more difficult. After all, for most kids, Elvis is the music of their parents' -- or grandparents' -- generation. Aaron O'Connell, a 17-year-old from Fredericksburg, Va., said it could be tough to make Elvis relevant again. "Probably in today's world, like, he wouldn't be as cool, but back then he probably was," said O'Connell, a high school junior. (Sale of EPE, Source: AP) We're all doing our bit to spread the word that Elvis is still cool And what could be cooler than this pic :wub: http://i2.photobucket.com/albums/y48/elvis1959/68leather1.jpg
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