Black Ops Advertising. Mara Einstein

digital tracking, connecting content to target audiences has become superfluous, meaning that advertisers have no motivation to support programming with substance, only content that attracts the target audience of interest.

      Today, when it comes to target audiences, marketers are most interested in the cohort known as Millennials. This young adult group accounts for $1.3 trillion in annual spending, according to the Boston Consulting Group, and that figure will grow as this generation continues to mature and more fully enter the job force.²⁹ By 2015, there were more Millennials than baby boomers (83.1 million versus 75.4 million).³⁰ Millennials are also the primary users of online technologies, and they are the Influencers that marketers want to reach who will help promote their products both online and off.

       THE DEMOGRAPHIC THAT STILL MATTERS: MILLENNIALS

      Marketers talk about an age of post-demographic consumerism. According to marketing research firm Trendwatching, “people—of all ages and in all markets—are constructing their own identities more freely than ever. As a result, consumption patterns are no longer defined by ‘traditional’ demographic segments such as age, gender, location, income, family status and more.”³¹ To a certain extent that is true. Identities are more fluid. There are senior citizens interested in skateboarding, and in the UK there are more female than male video gamers, as well as more over forty-four than under eighteen. However, this idea misses the point. The Internet and its concomitant data will reduce—but not eliminate—the need to segment consumers in traditional ways. That is because while marketers need to get people to interact with them online, the way to get them there, for now, is mostly through traditional media. Because of this, marketers continue to categorize audiences by focusing on predictable life cycles. Those life stages—particularly the transition into adulthood—still and likely always will affect consumer purchases. Those transitioning now are part of a cohort known as Millennials.

      Millennials—also known as Gen Y or Echo Boomers—are defined typically as those born between the early 1980s and the early 2000s.³² The Pew Research Center describes this generation as “relatively unattached to organized politics and religion, linked by social media, burdened by debt, distrustful of people, in no rush to marry—and optimistic about the future.”³³ They have been widely maligned as entitled, coddled, lazy, self-centered, and digitally addicted.

      Societally, they have grown up in a time of instant gratification, abundance, and on-demand products. I have seen this in my own home. My daughter is a Millennial, and when she was young I got a video of H.R. Pufnstuf from the library. It was a TV show I loved as a child, and I wanted to share it with her. At the end of the program, one of the actors points at the viewer and says, “See you next week.” It was then my daughter asked me, “Why wait until next week?” I had to explain that unlike her ability to watch SpongeBob whenever she wanted to, if I wanted to watch my favorite TV show, I could only watch it once a week, and I had to be sitting in front of the television at the one and only single time during the week when it was on. She was horrified. The idea that she would not be able to watch what she wanted when she wanted was completely alien to her, as it is for others of her generation. On a personal level, Millennials grew up with helicopter parenting, being told they were special, and almost never hearing the word “no.”³⁴ Most importantly for advertisers, they are the “digital natives”—a generation that has grown up with digital technologies and who fluidly move between their online and offline lives.³⁵

      Millennials are the largest generational cohort, accounting for just over 24 percent of the U.S. population.³⁶ In a wide-ranging research study, MTV found that their key concerns are getting a job, graduating college, and moving out of their parents’ house: really no different from previous generations in that regard. Where they differ, however, is that they are “later to launch”—that is, they tend to postpone adulthood (and marriage) for as long as possible.

      No group this large, however, is homogeneous. To better understand their concerns, marketers break up this demographic into psychographic segments. Ypulse, a research company dedicated to understanding Millennials, created these five groups: Muted Millennials (live at home, risk-averse), Supremes (socially high achievers, most well educated of the groups, more than half are influenced by word of mouth), Moralistic Middle (old-fashioned values, thrill-shy), Alt Idealists (cause oriented, value individuality), and Beta Dogs (very passionate, networkers, most open to advertising, and driven by appearance).³⁷ Interesting to note that two of the five groups (Supremes and Beta Dogs) are open to marketing and particularly to word of mouth. These segments are the Influencers that drive brand adoption by others.

      They are a generation dripping in brand culture. Not only do they interact with brands, they spend time talking about brands and recommending them (or not!) to their friends and followers both online and off.³⁸ Millennials, and in particular younger Millennials (ages eighteen to twenty-four), are more likely than boomers to say “people seek me for knowledge and brand opinion” (52 percent vs 35 percent), and to say that they are willing to share their brand preferences on social media (57 percent versus from 31 percent).³⁹ According to MTV, a whopping 81 percent recommend brands to people by word of mouth, while research from Intel found that 74 percent believe they influence the purchase decisions of their peers.⁴⁰ This makes sense, as this group is used to crowdsourcing information, so they value the opinion of many others when making decisions.⁴¹

      Moreover, they do not only influence each other. If you are the parent of a Millennial or a Gen Zer (the generation after Y), you know what I mean. We are on Facebook, we text, and we might even learn Snapchat, if for no other reason than to be connected to our offspring in the way they feel most comfortable in relating.

       MARKETING AND THE MILLENNIAL MINDSET

      Given the changes in technology and Millennials’ propensity to interact with brands, marketers have changed how they interact with this group. While in the past, the goal was to know who the consumer was in order to craft a message that resonated with them, today the goal is to know who the consumer is so that you can get them to spend time with you. Consumer product companies want to be Millennials’ friends.

      Marketing campaigns therefore play to making Millennials feel good about themselves. Doritos inspires Millennials to create advertising for the brand in hopes of having their commercial appear on the Super Bowl—recognition on a grand scale—and convinces them to “be bold” by participating in adventurous missions, like jumping from a thirty-foot platform or participating in a roller derby with pro racers, an act which might lead to tickets to SXSW to see Lady Gaga. Doritos psychographically describes this group as “Young and Hungry,” literally and figuratively, and their marketing reflects this attitude. In another example, Marlboro has an international campaign that uses the tagline “Don’t be a Maybe.” Their videos show young people having fun—driving in a car with their hair blowing in the breeze or jumping from a significant height onto an air-filled blob. Similar to Doritos, they play to the idea of living boldly. As they say in an internal promotional video:

      As a brand Marlboro was not resonating with adult smokers even though its values of freedom, authenticity and master of destiny were. Smokers missed the essence of the cowboy which led us to our opportunity. Eliminate the word MAYBE from our smokers’ vocabulary to become the catalyst that inspires smokers from just thinking about life to taking the lead in life. To live the Marlboro values. To be True. Bold and forever forward.⁴²

      The communication to Millennials, then, is that Marlboro smokers don’t sit back and watch; they take part in the action. But this is just an updated twist on the cowboy that represented freedom and individualism for past generations.

      Another gimmick marketers have used with this group to considerable effect is asking young people if they can pick up and go away for a weekend—the ultimate expression of freedom. Anheuser-Busch asked Millennials if they were “up for whatever.” One thousand lucky Millennials who submitted an audition video on Facebook and who promoted the brand on Twitter with the hashtag #upforwhatever were put on a plane and sent to an unknown destination. Once on the ground, they found themselves amidst a three-day party including celebrities, games, and lots of Bud Light.⁴³