During her Q&A session after her presentation, Christina Norman, President, MTV Networks touched upon an interesting point: Sometimes young consumers just want to see silly or funny things. Now, I’m not saying that is the status quo when it comes to youth, and neither does Christina. But, MTV gets it: Customers are human.

MTV strives to create a total experience for its consumers, by enabling its audience to decide what they want to see and when they want to see it. While tools make a great experience possible, its the ideas — the collaboration between MTV and its consumers — that really contributes to their loyalty. By recognizing the emotional connection plays such an important role, MTV forges and creates opportunities for personal investment; it takes effort and tenacity to maintain and grow ties with younger generations throughout their life stages.   

MTV balances this quest for providing content by feeding sites and shows like MTV Think! to enable consumers to find and contribute to local and national causes they care about, while content from TRL feeds their passion to be influencers.

On a personal note, MTV provides one of my favorite guilty pleasure TV shows, The Hills. Somehow, MTV managed to tap into and draw out the youth unconscious: 1) A love of people and all things information (especially personal); 2) Interest in the experience of others; 3) Anything that involves a beach, sand, and/or party.

I can’t wait to see what they do next.