Tom H. C. Anderson - Next Gen Market Research

With the recent buzz around Ricky Gervais and the Golden Globe awards I thought it was a good time to report on who the Gen Y favorite celebrities are this year. Can you guess who’s number one?

Overall, six of the Top-10 Gen Y celebrities are male. Johnny Depp remains Gen Y’s overall favorite celebrity though his popularity is a bit weaker than last year. Will Smith who took the number two spot last year has moved down to eight place while Robert Downey Jr. has taken the penultimate spot. Jennifer Aniston is the overall favorite female celebrity.

Breaking out the results by gender we see some interesting differences. Gen Y guys tend to think about male celebrities when asked to name their favorite celebrity. All top-10 celebrity positions among the guys go to male celebrities, beginning with Robert Downey Jr. and ending with Adam Sandler. Among female celebrities, Jessica Alba is mentioned most often by Gen Y men.

Gen Y women think of Johnny Depp first when they think celebrity. Rachel McAdams comes in second overall among Gen Y women.

Seems like the bad-boy look is in.

@TomHCAnderson

[Note: Rankings Anderson Analytics 2011 GenX2Z US College Study. Unaided Top of Mind celebrity awareness, unstructured comments coded using text analytics software. Sample represents comments from n=1,000 17-22 year olds (US college students)]