Forbes 30 under 30 Marketing Strategy (P2)

Executive summary

Forbes launched the 30 Under 30 list in 2011 as both a response to Fortune's 40 Under 40 list, the rise of Business Insider, and that for the first time in history, "being young" was "actually an advantage for most fields."The Under 30 brand currently reaches 26 million 13-to-34-year-olds through its year-long marketing growth engine and cross-platform ad campaign with digital media content and live events.The name "30" under 30 is actually a misnomer. The US list recognizes a total of 600 people per year, with 30 individuals selected across 20 different industries, and there are over 30 countries and regions that all have their own lists.After running the 30 Under 30 program for ten years, Forbes has said there have been 100,000 nominees, with 20,000 nominations per year in the US alone.With 600 spots available per year, there are about 30 applications for every spot, equivalent to a 2 to 3% acceptance rate. Forbes says it's harder to get onto the Under 30 list than to get into Stanford (4.8%) or Harvard (5.2%).The 2022 US honorees collectively raised over $1 billion in funding, nearly 50% identify as a person of color, with 61% male and 38% female, and 24% immigrants from 58 different countries as wide as Albania to the Bahamas to Syria.Forbes has three kinds of revenue: advertising, subscriptions, and brand extensions, like conferences and brand licensing deals. The company expects its subscription revenue to decelerate over the next few years but expects its brand extensions and advertising revenue to accelerate because of the Under 30 brand.The 30 Under 30 is currently the top revenue generator for Forbes due to 1) its year-long digital media campaign that drives upwards of 6 million extra web visitors per year and 2) its 10,000-strong exclusive "nominee" community, which allows Forbes to bag multi-year advertisement deals with sponsors and charge up to $9000 per ticket for the four day, in-person "Under 30" Summit events.Advertisers who sign up for the 30 Under 30 do so to reach young audiences whose finances will grow as they age, so they sign multi-year franchise campaigns. The key selling point to advertisers is the community of over 10,000 entrepreneurs and celebrities who join, promote, and amplify the brand year after year. Critically, everyone that has ever won are nearly all still under the age of 40.A five-step framework to replicate Forbes's success is: 1) Build a target audience of ideal customer persona influencers, 2) attract these "influencers" with a prize they genuinely value, 3) include a viral growth engine built into your competition, 4) make sure the community around your awards can be scaled, and 5) tailor your content marketing strategy around exclusivity.

The history of the "30 Under 30"

The history of the "Forbes 30 under 30" actually begins with the "Fortune 40 under 40." From 1999 to 2003, Fortune created the "40 under 40" list as a purely numeric ranking of wealth to capture the value creation of the first dot com boom. (*source

They brought it back in 2009 to use as a more subjective ranking of power and influence, and it included the founders of Google, Mark Zuckerberg, Tiger Woods, and plenty of other tech execs and celebrities. (source )

Why 2009? One reason could be the rise of its competitor Business Insider, which was founded in 2007 as a purely digital aggregator of business news and industry verticals focused on millennials - the 18-34 demographic. Facebook was also on its meteoric rise, and so legacy business media companies like Fortune and Forbes needed some way to keep up. (source )

Forbes launched its 30 under 30 two years later. Forbes editor Randal Lane created it as a way to chronicle a "cultural shift in the mainstream perception of youth and ambition." He said at the time, "This was a list that was perfect for its time, in that this is the first time that being young is actually an advantage for most fields." (source )

Forbes was known for its annual list of billionaires and all sorts of other lists, but the 30 Under 30 slowly expanded in both readership and editorial priority to become the company's most influential brand. In particular, it grew the publication's readership beyond its aging core print audience to a younger, more diverse, and a more online cohort of millennials. (source )

One could say it worked. And that one would be Randall Lane, who was eventually promoted to the company's Content Chief. (source )

According to Comscore data, Forbes still lagged behind Business Insider when it came to unique visitors between the ages of 18-34 in 2015. The BI CEO and editor-in-chief Henry Blodget had been aggressively expanding Insider to attract even more millennial readers, and most of the company had recently been acquired by Axel Springer. (source )

To keep up, Forbes increasingly leveraged its 30 Under 30 franchise, and today, it has become the company's flagship product. We'll get into all about how it benefitted Forbes financially in a moment. But first…