Like, deregulation rules!

Most telecom industry insiders agree that competition is good. It means more choice for customers. But for wireline and wireless carriers, it also means more potential customers for which to compete. Increasingly, companies are aiming their marketing and advertising sights and dollars at young people.

Call them Generation X and Generation Next. As these two groups grow up and move out, they will have more carrier choices than their parents did.

Geography used to determine a customer's local carrier. With the growth of competitive local exchange carriers, that is no longer the case. A customer can choose a CLEC for local phone service, the incumbent regional carrier for Internet access and a third carrier for long-distance service. That's not even counting the cellular phones and pagers most Generation Xers can't seem to do without.

And if deregulation continues to make the slow-but-steady-progress toward a truly open market, one company will be able to offer all those services and more before 2000.

Generation Next will be the first to reap those benefits. These are people between the ages of 16 and 24. Many already have either pagers or cellular phones and have suffered through the growing pains of America Online. More technologically aware and gadget-savvy, these young adults cannot be claimed as "sure things" by any telecom company.

"I call them the Star Trek generation because they are looking for the easiest way to communicate, and a phone with a pop-up video screen looks really cool to them," said Michael Bennett, director of strategic planning for PrimeCo. PrimeCo already plans to market to younger children with toys based on its TV advertising campaign featuring a pink alien. Just in time for Christmas!

BellSouth plans to offer pre-packaged phone services and equipment in retail stores such as Target later this year. The first package will be aimed at 13- to 17-year-olds. "We can't assume any longer that just because Mom and Dad are our customers, their children will be," said Matthew Carter Jr., BellSouth director of new market and channel management. "We have to get them while they're young."

Thinking creatively and selling innovatively to win consumers instead of relying on geography to deliver "legacy" customers are two goals of telecom deregulation. They are challenges for which the industry seems to be setting its course.