Our 8-to-12-year-old techies

Fortunately, marketers can no longer find them just by advertising during Saturday-morning cartoons. Unfortunately, they are an increasingly prime target of marketers (and marketers are finding them anyway, of course). Why? The Los Angeles Times reports that they are our family CTOs (chief technology officers), and marketers know that very well. They know that, "by some estimates, tweens influence $60 billion in spending annually." The simple reason why they're so darn tech-literate is that, unlike us, they grew up with technology (and the information overload that sells it and that's enabled by the technology itself!). The Times piece illustrates all this very readably, with family stories and marketers' perspectives.