The Internet is a modern day three ring circus: there’s something cool going on everywhere you look. According to Comscore, 45% of all page transitions are ‘link following’. Every web page offers multiple enticements to move on. To create interest, you must say something worth staying with, in other words ‘relevant’.

Keeping Gen Y’s attention in an environment defined by distraction requires being ‘interesting’.

Gen Y blogger, Meg Roberts, wrote an article titled “How I would market to myself’ in which she offers this advice:

“Focus on adding value rather than overloading on content. The best way to ensure we’re listening to your messages is to make them relevant to us.  Learn why we’re in a given community, whether it’s Facebook or Twitter or an iPhone app, and speak to us without severely interrupting what we’re doing .”

Note the words “without severely interrupting”. When creating messages for Millennials, it’s important to ask whether or not the message meet the test of whether it’s worth interrupting.

If a friend wouldn’t interupt than a marketer shouldn’t either.

For Millennials, interruptions are the height of rudeness. There is a heirarchy of communications. A phone call is highly interruptive – and it’s little wonder that Millennials make very few phone calls. Phone calls are reserved for very important conversations, like telling your parents you need money or will be traveling to Puerto Rico rather than home for spring break. For less momentus communications, which is to say most communications, they rely on texts.  A teen sends hundreds of texts a day. Texts are less intrusive than phone calls and yet still has urgency. Email is even less intrusive than texts. Email is used when a message is not time sensitive or does not require an immediate response.

Is it Relevant, Cool or Exciting?

Another test for relevance is whether a communication is ‘status update worthy’. As Gen y marketer and community member, Josip Petrusa, puts it this way:

“One thing we love to do is tell the world when something cool, great or exciting is happening to us. In a sense, we love to brag for attention. You’ll always hear about the vacation we’re going on, the sports event we’re going to, the movie we’re seeing, the concert we were at and I could go on and on. Make it something that will give me a reason to tell everyone else about it. A funny and ridiculous video-clip, a great experience or something that even seems exclusive, would all be status update worthy.” You have to reinvent cool, great and exciting.”

What’s In It for Me?

There is a myth that Millennials don’t like advertising. Actually this isn’t true. They like ads that are entertaining or funny, especially for brands they already love. They love the iPad, Axe and current Kindle ads.  These are ads that give back something in return for attention.

The Associated Press (AP), a group with a vested interest in Millennials’ interest in news and ads, released a study in March that looked at ‘news ad fatigue’.  The study took an in-depth, ethnographic approach that focused especially on people 18-34. The research concluded that consumers are “tired, even annoyed, by the current experience of advertising,” and that, as a result, “they don’t trust very much of it“.

Younger consumers, ages 18-34, want to be in the know, and two thirds think it’s important to be among the first to hear news compared with just 10 % of older people. Millennial consumption of news is actually increasing. According to  Mckinsey the average person consumes 72 minutes of news a day, compared with just 60 minutes in 2006 and the increase was driven almost entirely by people under the age of 35.

Young adults have adopted ways of getting their news that are much different from those of past generations. Younger consumers are not only less reliant on the newspaper to get their news; they also consume news across a multitude of platforms and sources, all day, constantly. They also think of each other as their main news source.

Here’s a description of how “Mark”, a 28-year old manager of an online travel agency consumes media.

“Mark’s news cycle was continuous and he spent up to six hours a day searching for and receiving information. Mark was on the Internet most of the day and used that time to keep up to date on news coverage and sports-related information. Mark liked his news to be “punchy” and pointfocused. He read the headlines followed up online to “find out what’s happening” with stories that he wanted to track. Mark’s news consumption was related to other activities that he was engaged in and although he was actively consuming the news, it was almost always in tandem with other activities such as driving or working…

You may be surprised to learn,  that brands do not do all that well in social media among Millennials. Only 12% have ‘friended ‘ a brand on Facebook. Only four brands on Facebook have more than five million ‘liking’ – only 16 have more than 1.5 million.  22% of Millennial use Twitter, a small number to begin with, but of those, only 29% follow companies.  Friending a brand is a high hurdle. In terms of Facebook fans, the numbers are even lower. Just 2 brands have more than 5 million fans on Facebook, Starbucks and Coca-cola.

So what do they find relevant?

It will probably come as no surprise that the main reason to join a fan group on Twitter or Facebook is to get news or discounts. Here according to a Pace University study are the top reasons to fan a brand on Facebook:

• Getting news or product updates (67%)
• Having access to promotions (64%)
• Viewing or downloading music or videos (41%)
• Submitting opinions (36%)
• Connecting with other consumers (33%)

Meg Roberts concurs. Her blog post, “How I would Market to Myself”, goes on to offer this advice about  ’free stuff’ and interating ‘conversatoinally’ with her favorite brands.

“We’re just out of college.  Loan payments are becoming a harsh reality.  If you want us to try out your brand, give us some free samples or coupon codes.  Plus, if a company could build an entire online community based on the loyalty rewards system, I’d probably check it out to see what other users are saying about new products/sales/coupons/etc.”

“Don’t use social media as a billboard but as a telephone. Social media should be an interactive tool, and when your consumers speak, listen and respond. In my experience, the most successful Twitter accounts and Facebook fan pages are those that go beyond simple @replies and wall posts. Ask questions, get our feedback, and implement changes. Everyone likes to have their ego stroked, right? Brand consumers, especially Gen Y ones, are no different. What feels better than having a company listen to reasonable, quality recommendations we’ve made?”

(This post is the second in a series about digital marketing to Millennials based on a speech given at iMedia Summit, Miami on June 15. Tomorrow: “What Do They Want? Tapping Into Desires”)

Are Millennials Attention Deficient?

With Millennials, earning attentions can also be the most challenging step in the communications model. Millennials spend their attention the way the rest of us doing money – very carefully. They are accused of having Attention Deficit Disorder. I disagree. They simply have superior Attention Deserving Detectors.

One of the characteristics that separates young adults from less digitally savvy older consumers is their remarkable filters for tuning out information they don’t want to hear.

This category of information includes alarm clocks, due dates, nagging parents, and negative feedback. It also includes advertisements. According to a study by the Participatory Network and Pace’s Lubin school, 81% say ads are not relevant and 36% say they never look at them. The reason is that they perceive advertising to be irrelevant at best, and manipulative at worst. Rebecca Denison, a 20-something social media analyst at Edelman and member of our Super Consumer Gen Y community puts it this way:

“The big thing for me and my friends is that we don’t want to know we’re being marketed to, if that makes sense. We’re smarter than that (or so we think), and we don’t like to be advertised to. It feels like manipulation, so I think a big aspect marketing to Gen Y has to be a lack of manipulation. You have to be really careful that you don’t make it too much like old school marketing because I think that really does turn Gen Y off.”

Information My Way: Customized, Personalized, Contextualized

Millennials don’t attend to banner ads, commercials or radio ads because they prefer to discover or search for information than have it foisted upon them. They are masters at finding the information they want. They also know how to ensure that the information they want is pushed to them. A year ago, I was introduced to NetVibes by a Gen Y’er who assumed I was already using it. They are masters of RSS feeds and bookmarks, Google alerts and customized home pages. As Kristin Dziadul, another Gen Y marketing community member put it, “In the attention economy today, we don’t find information, it finds us”.

This is not to say that ads never work. Of course they do. But with Millennials context and credibility may matter more than message in enabling an ad to breakthrough. A message from a friend or trusted source is far more likely to be attended than a randomly placed ad.

A new joint study by Facebook and Nielsen demonstrated the lift a campaign receives in effectiveness simply by being in a social context. An ad on a homepage enjoys a 10% lift in recall relative to a control group. Put the same ad on a Facebook page with some social context and it enjoys a 16% lift. But the same ad in an organic feed enjoys a 30% lift.

The key to getting attention is to stop waving your hand in the air and start thinking about how to get your brand discovered. Creative brilliance and heavy rotation is no longer enough. With the Millennial audience, attention is less about intrusion than it is hiding in plain sight. Millennials want to believe that they have discovered information for themselves. It’s no accident that the hottest bars, like El Secreto in Sao Paulo, are usually well-kept secrets. What’s the point of knowing about it if everyone else does too?

Fishing Where the Fish Are

‘Being found’ is not easy. It requires a shift in thinking away from message broadcasting to extreme narrowcasting. It also requires more imaginative ways to embed messages into places where they will be welcome.  Ironically though, it may be easier to be ‘found’ on a more obscure digital site or special interest community than on Yahoo.

The top sites for Millennials might surprise you in their degree of specialization. Facebook of course is the number one site for 18-24 year olds, yet it is really is not one site but a Balkanized nation of groups, subgroups and special interests. Bill Tancer of Hitwise provided drill down data on top sites for 18-24 year olds by income, geography and ethnicity. The top sites for 18-24 year olds on an index basis might surprise you. Those with family incomes $150,000 are actually most likely to be found concentrated on sites like DeviantArt, Fanfiction, UrbanChat, OVGuide, ProjectPlaylist,and MathXL.com. Those under $30,000 are most likely to be found on some of those sites but also badoo, zShare.net, mocospace and IMVU.

A New Idea – Search Enabled Discovery

Another way to ensure your ad is ‘welcome’ and ‘hiding in plain sight’ is offered by a company I learned about this week at iMedia, Vibrant Media. Vibrant Media offers a way to provide greater context for brand messages by embedding ads within relevant content. Think of it as search meets social media. Here is how it works. As an online user is reading an article, certain words or terms are highlighted by hypertext links, similar to how they appear in a blog or wiki. When the reader, who is presumably reading this article because it is relevant to them, passes their mouse over these words, an advertisement appears (and disappears as the mouse passes on). The content can be tailored to be relevant to the key word and can offer more than a standard banner; it can be an API, video or demo. For example, BING used Vibrant to demo its search engine. (To see how it works check out my bylined article on iMediaconnection today. Near the bottom of the first page, the word ‘social media’ is hyperlinked to a dynamic search app from imediaconnection that features what else, ‘social media’!).

(This post is the first in a series about digital marketing to Millennials based on a speech given at iMedia Summit, Miami on June 15. Tomorrow: “Who Cares? I is for Interest”)

However, difficult it is, new research from Syncapse suggests that recruiting customers to a Facebook fan page may be a goal worth pursuing. The research shows fans are much more valuable than other users and put a dollar and cents value on the difference.

They concluded,  ”A fan base is a self-segmented group of highly valuable customers“.

Syncapse used a combination of a 4000 member survey  and “in-depth proprietary research and data analyses of two-years available data across millions of interactions, Syncapse was able to compare the worth of a fan relative to non-fans for the top 20 brands on Facebook –Nokia, BlackBerry, Motorola, Secret, Gillette, Axe, Dove, Victoria’s Secret, Adidas, Nike, Coca-Cola, Oreo, Skittles, Nutella, Red Bull, Pringles, Playstation, Xbox, Starbucks, and McDonald’s. Results are broken out by brand and results vary a lot across and even within brands. Yet the overall pattern is clear. They conclude Fans were found to spend more on products, be more loyal, are more likely to recommend the brand to a friend:

Syncapse has observed that an average fan may participate with a brand ten times a year and will make one recommendation. But, an active fan may participate thirty times and make ten recommendations. The impact this has on fan value is quite dramatic. In the case of Coca-Cola, the best case for fan value reaches $316.78 but is $137.84 for an average fan. In the worse case scenario, a fan is worth $0. This degree of variability in the value of a fan must be a major consideration in determining how brands address different types of fans in efforts to move them up the value ladder. In short, the goal must be to reduce fan variability while moving the average fan value to the active end of the range.

Before you can ‘move customers up the ladder’, you have to encourage them to join in the first place.

Research shows that fanning a brand is all about content. 67% join to get news or product updates, 64% to get promotions and 41% to view or download music or videos. This is consistent with research I heard presented yesterday at iMedia Brand Summit by the Online Publisher’s Association (OPA) which indicates online users spend 40% of their time on content.

The second most important reason for friending a brand is to interact with the company or other users.  36% say they friend a brand to ‘submit opinions’ and another 33% say they want to connect with other cusotmers. Again the OPA study confirms this insight – 28% of online users’ time is spent on ‘community’ activities.

While this data is about fans and brands in general, it is especially true of Millennials. Gen Y joins brands to gain social currency (content and offers) and to interact with the company and other fans. Paul Parkin of SALT branding in San Francisco was interviewed recently by MediaPost on the subject of Gen Y and their ‘trust’ for brands. The article was widely tweeted for its insight that Millennials trust ‘channels’ over brands (“Fickle Gen Y Trusts Channels over Brands“). Farther down in the article, he commented on the need for Gen Y to interact.

Q: How important are demographics?

A: In some ways, very. Baby Boomers have one set of expectations of brands, and an idea of what it means to trust them. Gen X is quite different. In many ways, they are the brand generation. They latched onto powerful brands that emerged in the 1980s and ’90s, and if you asked most people in that group to name 10 brands that define them, they could probably do it. Gen Y is completely different — they want to multitask, and are much more into “we,” in the sense of collaboration. They want to interact with companies, and with each other.

This conclusion fits with everything we know about Millennials.  The key to attracting brand friends may be primarily promotions and content, but to retain Gen Y fans, its essential to let them speak out to the company and to each other. A brand fan page is really a platform for a conversation, a modern day ‘salon’. The brand hosts the salon, but if it is wise, will ensure that it’s really more about the guests than about the host.

They are right to be concerned. Pew data also shows that in 2010, only 41% of all 18-29 year olds have full-time jobs compared to half in 2006.

By contrast, the proportion of older adults employed full-time stayed about the same.  10% of Millenials report losing their jobs recently, compared to just 6% of older adults.

The cost of a college education (amount families pay after adjusting for financial aid) according to Money magazine has skyrocketed 439 percent since 1982“. Increasingly, students are funding the cost of their education via student loans. College debt constrains their post-college options and places a drag on their income for a decade or more.

With high paying jobs in shorter supply, students, grads and parents are questioning what is the true value of a college degree?

ROI as well as depth of majors and the college experience are considered when it comes to selecting a college.  A MarketWatch article reported the results of a survey among 2010 high school seniors. About two-thirds reported that their families’ economic concerns “greatly” or “somewhat” influenced where they were applying to college.  The decision about where to attend is also being influenced by other practical considerations such as graduation rates and percent of students employed after graduation.

Harvard has been tracking attitudes toward college among undergraduates 18-24 years old for over a decade. Over the years the study has expanded to include non-college students and 25-29 year olds. Their most recent report is based on responses from 3,000 18- to 29-year-olds from late January through late February, 2010. They found that concern about finding and keeping a job is high across college students and non-college students alike.

“The biggest thing that [college] students share with their [non-college] peers is an intense anxiety about the economy. Sixty-percent of Millennials are concerned about their ability to meet their current bills and financial obligations and 59% are worried about being able to afford a place to live. Almost half of those who are currently in the workplace are afraid that they’ll lose their job, and this fear is echoed in college students’ anxiety about their future after graduation – 84% indicated that finding a job will be ‘very difficult.’ Students are also worried about their ability to keep paying for college, with 45% of 4-year college students and 64% of community colleges expressing concern about staying in school.”

Wednesday night, Josip Petrusa and Chanelle Schneider moderated an hour-long Twitter chat using the hastage, #GenYchat (transcript here). Their topic? The “Experience Catch 22″ – how to get a job or job experience without having any. The 34 contributors vented their frustrations and shared some practical advice. Most agreed that internships help bridge the gap between college and job, but often are not valued by employers.  Blogger Jenny Blake of “LifeAfterCollege.com” (who just landed a book deal, congrats Jenny!), has this to say about an internship eased her transition:

“During the first quarter of my junior year at UCLA I got the opportunity of a lifetime. My political science professor and mentor suggested a possible internship opportunity for me at astartup company in Palo Alto. I grew up there and was ahead in school, so I told her and the founder I would move home to work full time if it meant I could help start the company. I anticipated filing papers…I was wrong. I had tremendous opportunities and responsibilities, but I hadn’t anticipated what it would be like to be in the real world – to work full time, to save money, to spend so much money, to be so far from my friends. As much as I loved the confidence I got from working so hard and learning so much every day, at times I felt incredibly lonely and confused.”

We were curious to see if other Gen Y had similar feelings, so we posted the question to our Super Consumer Community of Gen Y marketers. “Did your education prepare you for what your are doing? Should it have?”  Here’s what they had to say:

Kyle: I feel like I come from a unique background having partaken in a specialized program at my Alma Mater called the BDIC (Bachelor’s Degree in Individualized Concentration). Essentially, what it allowed me to do was really narrow down the focus of my studies at college to the topics I KNEW I was interested in pursuing in the professional world. I had the incredible opportunity to work closely with 3 professors from 3 of the colleges within my University to design a classroom and experiential curriculum around my BDIC in Sports Marketing. My BDIC experience allowed me to handpick the courses I took and pair them with internships that allowed me to really get a hands-on feel for the subject matter. Had I not had been given the reins and allowed to work in the experiential learning aspect of my curriculum, i feel like I would have left college under prepared for the challenges that one encounters on the job. While I gained a great deal of knowledge and insight from my internships, it also didn’t hurt that it helped build my resume – I feel like I finished college with a leg up on the competition for jobs in the narrow industry of sport since I had 4 internships as opposed to 1-2.

Josip:  I think education we’re getting is great and it would prepare you for that field your being educated in. The problem doesn’t so much lie in education, i think the issues lie in what happens after education. Also, sometimes education doesn’t prepare you for actual real world use. Being a philosopher, historian and many other programs that get a lot of students quite frankly don’t have real jobs associated with them. For instance my political science major does not dictate I join the government or politics. I also find that thousands of students graduate with degrees that quite useless unless you plan on being a teacher or something. Although, there are jobs for every field, the ones I mentioned at the end of the first paragraph have the most real world jobs waiting for them. My university has thousands of students graduating with political science degrees every year but I hardly see any political scientists in the real world.

Rob: This is the kind of question schools should be challenging themselves with at least once a year. I think an opportunity exists to bring more real world cases into the classroom. I know case competitions often give students the chance to sink their teeth in to real projects, but those are often some of the more challenging ones employees take on (read: looking for free consulting/ideas from students) and likely not typical enough tasks to get a solid sense of what an entry level marketing or finance person really might do at company X on a day to day basis.

Micah: Funny you should as this is a topic I have been wondering about myself very recently. I am in the midst of a Masters in Library and Information Studies and I am starting to get very worried about if I will actually have any practical skills when I graduate. Most of the coursework I have done thus far has been theoretical-based and while understanding information needs of groups and database structures seems useful, I still have no idea what it actually means to work in a library day to day. My former Master’s degree (I love college) was in American Studies, and while I learned a great deal about the culture and history of our country, I graduated with no practical work experience and went back to school after a summer working as a temp for a medical supply company. In conversations with friends recently I have started to think that if anything vocational training needs to become a more active part of our educational system. Internships are great, but since I have always had to work full time, I never had the opportunity to pursue one outside of my coursework. So basically, I have greatly enjoyed my education but I am not sure it has prepared me for active citizenry or professional life. Any steps I have made in those directions have been of my own interests and initiative.

Derek: Education itself is a wonderful thing. However, education in America today is something that is too broad. General education in college is the same things one learns in high school and middle school and even elementary school before that. This focus on general education prepares us for nothing but provides jobs for professors in the subjects. If we were to have those classes as options as opposed to being forced into them, perhaps we can begin the process of specialization. Internships further specialize but are a catch-22 in themselves. Requiring an internship as part of graduation (like Chapman University does) is an excellent idea because it helps build the résumé. The problem with requiring an internship is that not all students can afford to work for free or take time off from their paying jobs.

Tony Szymczak: Since I am in a totally different field not related to my degree my Education did not totally prepare me for what I am doing. I cannot count the number of classes that I was required to take that I had absolutely no interest in. When picking classes becomes a process of, what will count towards my degree so I can graduate on time, the education process fails. When you take a class that you really have no interest in it really destroys focus. Students face so many appeals for their attention it is hard enough to get them focused on education. The time they do spend on education should not be in classes they are forced to take because a college mandates it.

1971 Chrysler Simca = Freedom

I got my driver’s license on my 16th birthday. I promptly purchased a 1971 Chrysler Simca (yes orange although not as dirty as the one in the picture).

That tiny, tinny car was the biggest milestone in my life up to that point. It symbolized adult freedom and adult responsibility.  It wasn’t long before I had a real job and more money than I could make babysitting.

Most of my friends made a similar jump about the same time. In fact, 4 million cars were sold in 1971 and 1972, a record at the time that reflected the demographic bulge of the baby boom.

Today the coming age rite is more likely to be a cell phone than a car. In 1978, over half of all 16 year olds had a driver’s license. By 2008 that figure had dropped to 31%.

Over half of all 12 year-olds had a cell phone in 2009. In fact, one study of 17,000 school children revealed more pupils age 7-16 own a cell phone (85.5%)  than own a book (72.6%)!

It would seem a mobile phone now symbolizes a major adolescent milestone much as a car did for me. The Internet liberates them from being bored, and gives them new vistas. For me, mobility liberated me from hanging out with my family.  I had things to do! Places to go! A car connected me with a wider world, and became the center of my social life.

Tim Stock of scenarioDNA observed in his excellent lecture on how different generations were shaped ( “Culture Networks“), that for Boomers, ‘The Road’ was our network, our ‘information superhighway’.  The open road symbolized rebellion, and spawned countless archetypes.  A long, independent car trip was a rite of passage. I shudder now to think that I drove ALONE from Florida to Michigan at age 18.  Times have definitely changed, and Millennials do not have the same relationship with cars that we did. Mobility has a different meaning. They don’t need to ‘get out and go somewhere’.  They can shop online, download a movie, and connect with their friends without ever leaving their room.

As Stock observes, Gen Y is less concerned about where you go and more concerned with ‘how you transform what is there‘. ZipCar and its competitors seem to be perfectly in tune with this refocus on doing things. My Saturday afternoons were spent cleaning and waxing my car, then driving to the beach to see who else was there.  For Gen Y, it’s not about owning and caring for an incredible car, it’s about getting somewhere so you can experience something incredible.

Many Gen Y’ers actively reject the car-centric culture I grew up with.

Cars are seen as wasteful, status-oriented and ecologically unsound. Riding the bus does not have the same stigma it once did. Hummers have become a symbol of what’s wrong with consumer cultureThe money saved by not owning and operating a car frees up money for other things —  like education, technology and travel. These expderiences are higher priorities for Millennials and are perceived as offering greater return for the money.

Millennials don’t hunger for the latest model or edition.  In fact as a nation, we all appear to be satisfied with driving cars longer and longer.  The media age of vehicles in operation was 9.2 years in 2007. This figure is up from 6.5 years in 1990 and from 5.1 years in 1969. Perhaps we’re moving toward a model where we only buy a new one when the old one costs more to fix than it’s worth, as we do with refrigerators and most other ‘appliances’. The thrill of that new car smell is gone.

Paper & Plastic, Compost or EBay/Craiglist

This is a big adjustment for the automobile companies. But it is also an issue for any marketer of  ’durables,’  ’real estate’ or other big ticket items. According to Mike Doherty, President Cole Weber United, Millennials can be thought of as ‘generation prototype’.  ”For Gen Y, hard goods have soft lifespans.  Durability is relevant but mostly in relation to different products.” Gen Y thinks less about the ‘thing’ and more about the utility of the thing relative to other purchases. He writes in MediaPost last month….

“If you are in the “consumer durables” market, you already know that it’s a label that doesn’t make much sense to Gen Y. For Gen Yers, the consumer durables equation seems to look like this:

Product Lifespan = Adopted + Adapted + Left Behind for the Next Version

To a Gen Yer, durability is often acknowledged as being relevant, but its importance is relative to different products. It’s not too much of an exaggeration to say that there are really three recycling bins in Gen Y homes: Paper ‘n’ Plastic, Compost, and eBay/Craigslist. If Gen Yers are fortunate enough to get their hands on a v1.0 iPad, they will love being one of the first to have one, but they also know that there are more versions to come in a few months, making their hot item quickly feel outdated.”

This may look like ‘fickleness’ but I think it’s more of an indication of their tendency to not become romantically attached to ‘things’.  Gen Y is first and foremost looking for utility and performance. They will switch for a better alternative, without much hesitation.

This practicality and lack of romanticism poses a challenge to durable goods marketers – the lifestyle approaches of the past most likely won’t work. Young adults are more likely to ask the hard questions: “How does it perform relative to alternatives?” and “Why should I buy it at all?”

A chapter that begins on page 335 of 427 (paperback version not including Appendices and Sources), is titled “Millennial Generation”.

What makes this chapter on Millennials so fascinating twenty years after it was written is how uncannily it matches what we know to be true of how Gen Y is different from preceding generations.

Part of the reason for its accuracy is that the demographics of this generation were fairly predictable, even in 1991, and demographics are one of the forces that shapes generations. Strauss and Howe were able to accurately project the likely size (76 million) and make up (12% immigrant) based on fertility and immigration trends, even though only 33 million of them were alive when the book was published.

The authors were also tuned-in to the major shift in parenting and education as a cultural priority that was already underway by the early 90′s. This shift would prove to have  a remarkable impact on Millennial self-perceptions, aspirations and values. Nearly twenty years ago they noted that “this new generation of children is being treated as precious” and “Boom parents and teachers have also been slowing down the childhood development clock — unlike the Silent, who sped it up.”

“First-wave Millennials are riding a powerful crest of protective concern, dating back to he early 1980s, over the American childhood environment. In 1981, the year before the “Class of 2000″ was born, a volley of books assaulted adult mistreatment of children through the 13er (Gen X) birth years. Within the next couple of years, other authors began reconsidering the human consequences of divorce, latchkey households, and value neutral education.

In 1984, two kids as devils movies flopped at the box office, marketing the end of a dying genre and the start of a more positive film depiction of children.

From 1986 to 1988, polls reported a tripling in the popularity of ‘staying home with family’….In general, Boomer parents are determined to set an unerringly wholesome environment for their Millennial tots.

Where Silent parents had brought 13erkids along to see $-rated movies made about them, Boomers take the Millennials to see G-rated movies made for them.”"

“From 1976 through 1988 the proportion of students held back in elementary school jumped by one-third.”

One of the central tenets of the book is that the fourth generation in each cycle, the “Fourth Turning”, tends to be more civically minded and engaged.  They look for signs that yesterday’s fourth graders might be more evolved as citizens and found it in Anna Quindlen’s observations that kids seemed to be “assimiliating society’s ‘shalt nots’ about crime, drugs, polution and education with disquieting energy and unanimity.” (page 341) Twenty years later, we know from the research that today’s young adults are much more ‘upright’ than earlier generations in terms of their overall optimism, attitudes toward the environment and social action and behavior regarding drug and alcohol use, teen pregnancy, and crime.

What Howe and Strauss could not have known in 1991 was the remarkable impact that technology and the most severe economic recession in over 60 years would play in shaping this generation.

Beyond demographics, two of the forces that are shaping up to be the most influential are easy access to information of all kinds and a realization that America’s high flying lifestyle is most likely unsustainable.  They have already resulted in a more empowered, yet sobered, generation that is exhibiting very different consumer and media behavior as they move into their prime earning years.

BrandAmplitude‘s latest ebook (“How Millennials Are Different“) is focused on spotlighting the ways that Millennials are different from generations that came before at the same age. The book, which zeroes in specifically on longitudinal data from Pew Research and other sources, shows Gen Y is different in many significant ways, only some of which were predictable in 1991.

Nevertheless, what Strauss and Howe foresaw about how Millennials would be different from preceding generations based simply on cultural and demographic trends, they got remarkably right.

But last week, I spotted not one but two major shows with social media-related plot developments.

Glee: On Tuesday’s episode of Glee, the most nerdy of the Gleek students enjoyed a hilarious pilfered video of their nemesis, Sue Sylvester, the intense and intensely funny cheerleading coach dancing in her office to Olivia Newton John’s “Let’s Get Physical”. They quickly upload it to YouTube where it quickly reaches 3 million hits. Sue has the last laugh however, when Olivia Newton John contacts her about remaking the 80′s video together.

The Office: Then on Thursday in The Office, Pam Halpert searched out information incriminating Michael Scott’s new girlfriend of being unfaithful by leveraging access to her Facebook page through a friend. He later learns she is actually married, a development that would not have occurred but for Pam’s Facebook stalking.

The use of social media in these shows feels completely natural and plausible. One takes place in an office and another in a high school where social media is a routine part of daily life.  One wonders why we don’t see more?

This leads to me to speculate how technology and social media may have played a role in 90’s television shows and movies had it been as integrated into daily life then as it is now. Imagine the way things would have gone if…

Bonfire of the Vanities: Gordon Gecko accidentally ends up in the Bronx when he fails to make a fast enough turn in response to commands from his Garmin.  “Re—- calculating!”

Cosby:  Cliff Huxtable uses simulated reality game to instruct Cleo on the true cost of life on his own.

Sex in the City:  All the single ladies use the new Facebook social graph to prequalify dates, making it faster and easier to identify the ‘likes’ of potential dates, weed out creepers, identify keepers and generally ‘put a ring on it’.

Home Alone: Kevin McAllister uploads photo shopped pictures of himself in France to make his family believe he is actually already there. Meanwhile he projects Youtube videos of his family onto the walls to create the illusion of people being home for the benefit of the burglars.

Fresh Prince of Bel Air: Will Smith challenges Carlton to see who can get to 10,000 Twitter followers first.

Okay, you get the idea. Now consider how different the shows of the 70′s and 80′s might have been! What if there had been social media when they made Back to the Future, Golden Girls, Gilligan’s Island, Family Ties…

We take you now to State Street and Madison in downtown Chicago on a sunny Friday afternoon in April…

John: (Holding clipboard) Hi, do you have a minute?

Carol: (Pausing) What’s up?

John: (Perking up, surprised) Hi, thanks for stopping! My name is John, what’s yours?

Carol: Hi John, I’m Carol Phillips.

John: Nice to meet you Carol. We’re here to sign up members for Greenpeace, do you know Greenpeace?

Carol: Of course.

John: (Energetically) Greenpeace is the …

Carol: (Interrupting): John, are you a volunteer or paid?

John: (Sheepishly) Paid, but Greenpeace is a great organization, we ….

Carol: Can I ask you a question?

John: Sure….

Carol: What do you do when you’re not here?

John: (Confused) I work…(vaguely) and I have other jobs…

Carol: Are you a student?

John: I graduated last year from (well-known University)  in Finance. But there aren’t many jobs so I saw this one in Craig’s List and I’m glad to have it. But it’s tough.

Carol: It keeps you out of your parent’s basement…

John: (Quickly) Oh, I have an apartment.

Carol: Do you have student loans you have to pay as well?

John: (Suddenly looking very worried). Oh yes, a lot. They are on hold until July, but after that I don’t know what I’m gonna do…I had a job out of school as a stock broker, but I quit after a few weeks. I just didn’t feel good about it.

Carol: Very Millennial of you…

John: I felt like one of those guys that got us in all the trouble. I didn’t want to be one of those guys.

Carol: How much does it cost to join Greenpeace today?

John: Most people go for a $1.00 a day or $30 a month.

Carol: $365 a year.

John: No, $30.

Carol: But over a year that’s $365, right, you were in finance…

John: (Smiling again) Right!

Carol: What’s the minimum to join?

John: $15. It’s more about the advocacy than the money.

Carol: Okay, I’ll sign up on the Internet when I get home.

John: (Looking worried now) Well, I have to sign up at least two new members a day to keep my job.

Carol: How many have you signed up today?

John: (Looking very worried) Well, actually none today.

Carol: I have to go make a phone call, I’ll come back if you’re still here, I’ll sign up then.

John: (Disappointed) Oh, we’ll be here, we’re here all day.

Fifteen minutes later…

Carol: Hi, I’m back.

John: (Befuddled) Oh hi, it’s not you, I just had a bad …. it’s so much harder here. I like being on college campuses more. Here no one wants to talk to you. They are so used to being panhandled.

Carol: Yeah, I agree, this is not the best location, why not go to Millennium Park (points down Madison Street).

John: We go where they put us. We’ve got locations all over the city. The people on campuses are so much easier. I like the campuses.

Carol: Have you gotten any more members?

John: No.

Carol: Well sign me up for $30.

John: Oh, great, thanks. Just fill this out.

Carol: Do I have to pay right now?

John: Well, yes. But in all our years, we’ve never had a problem with a credit card.  I’ll give you my credit card…

Carol: No, that’s okay. Do you have a card?

John: (Reaching for his credit card)

Carol: No, I mean a business card, so we can stay in touch.

John: No.

Carol: Do you have a Twitter account?

John: No, I’m more of a Facebook user.

Carol: Okay, give me your email, I do market research and maybe I can use you in a study. I’ll be in touch.

John: Great. Thanks.

Carol: Bye

John: Bye!

One of the questions I hear a lot is ‘W

I have addressed this a few times, before in this blog (see “What’s a Millennial? Why Do Marketers Need a Label?”).  Just like the question ‘what is a brand‘ there is no easy agreed upon answer, although I generally answer that I subscribe to the definition used by Pew Research that a Millennial is someone currently age 18-29, born after 1980.

Just for fun, I decided to answer the question as definitively as I know how. Using Census data and Pew Research definitions, I created a chart that shows the number of people there are of each age, from 0-100 years, based on 2008 projections for 2010. (I also laid the actual birth years below so you can double check your identity.) No doubt this data will be updated when the new Census data becomes available, but for now, this may be as good as it gets.

Here are a few observations:

First it confirms that the big three are Millennials (including teens), Gen X’ers and Boomers. Millennials are 73 million strong. Boomers are still the largest cohort by a 3 million person margin and Gen X the smallest.  The bars become shorter and shorter past age 63 (yikes that’s a steep decline!) so we can reasonably project Boomers will shrink each year while Millennials and Gen X will be large for some years to come.

Another observation is that the Millennial population currently peaks at age 19-20. This explains the ultra competitiveness of college admissions the last few years with record applications, selectivity and enrollment. This peak is good news for the age groups that follow, those currently 18 or under, but bad news for those ahead them who are already struggling to find good jobs without the added stress of a peak number of new college grads hitting the market.

A final observation is that while teens are currently separated out, they should probably be considered part of the Millennial generation once they turn 18. Most generations span a period of more than 12 years, and this one will most likely be no exception.

My biggest take away from this chart is a caution. A group of 73 million people (current teens and Millennials) should not be thought of as a single ‘market’ any more than Boomers can be thought of as a ‘market’.

The concept of the ‘Millennial market’ for marketers should probably represent more of a psychographic or starting point for segmentation. Millennial, like Boomer, will most likely come to represent a set of values and way of looking at the world. I have long maintained that when marketing to Gen Y, values and behaviors are most defining and useful than age.

Pew seems to agree with me.  For the last month or so, Pew has offered a How Millennial Are You? online quiz. If you haven’t taken it, I urge you to try it.  The questions are scored 1-100 with anyone scoring 73 or higher rated a “millennial”. The scoring mechanism seems to be pretty accurate based on the results of the quiz. Most Millennials in fact do score pretty high.   I scored an 81, well into Millennial territory, a fact I am proud of.

The actual answers from the 2010 Pew Millennials survey on which the quiz is based can be seen here.  Even among true age-defined Millennials, the answers are a matter of degree, not black and white.

Sorry for all the numbers, but I think they provide a useful caution for marketers: It’s less about your age,  than about young you feel and act.

The definition of a ‘market’ is a ‘group of people or organizations with a need and the means to satisfy it’. Unfortunately, the “Millennial Market” may not be living up to its true potential, at least right now, due to lack of means. 

I am confident Millennials would be lining up to purchase iPads immediately if it weren’t for the high price tag. Fifty-seven percent of 18-34 year olds say price is the number one reason they aren’t buying an iPad, double the average for all ages.  

Tru-Research reports that 50% of teens in 2010 say “Not enough money” is their ‘biggest complaint’. This figure compares to just 30% ten years ago.  Twenty-three year old Christine Carter wrote an article in Retail Customer Experience this week to explain “Why Gen Y isn’t Buying Your Products“. She writes:

“Our education expenses, our social desire for luxury goods and our inability to save money make us very cash-poor. Because our generation responds and adapts rather quickly to social changes, we have emerged from the recession as “Recessionistas,” informed shoppers who stick to tight budgets while still managing to stay trendy and cultured. We’re looking for inexpensive versions of the items we desire and durable versions of the items we need.”

I hear the same lament almost daily from my marketing students — they consider themselves cash-strapped. Last week, every student expressed a preference to watch ads to access TV shows online rather than pay to avoid them.  When I see articles about Gen Y and shopping, they generally refer to teens. Young adults do not seem to get the same pleasure from shopping as those who are still spending their parents’ money.  They see it as stressful and are extremely careful shoppers, researching larger purchases and avoiding impulse buys. Of all age groups, Nielsen points out, they make the fewest shopping trips.

Just how poor are Millennials? Let’s look at the data.

First, the Recession was just the latest in a long downward trend in young adult wealth. I have reported before on Gen Y being one of the poorest generations of young adults. According to a 2008 report by DEMO’s, “The Economic State of Young America“, young adults of 2005 were worse off on nearly every dimension of economic well-being other than education than young adults in 1975. Here’s how The Nation summarized the DEMO’s findings:

Men without a high school diploma suffered most, their annual income plummeting by 34.2 percent, while men with a high school diploma or the equivalent earned the runner-up slot, with an income drop of 28.5 percent. As for women, those with less than a high school diploma, as well as those possessing just a diploma, lost less ground than their male counterparts; but then again, they’re still doing worse than before and, perhaps more to the point, they still fare significantly worse than men their age.

At the same time, today’s young workers have had to do more with less. College tuition rates have skyrocketed–in fact, rates for four-year public universities have more than doubled since 1980–with the unsurprising result that nearly two-thirds of students graduating from four-year colleges in 2008 left in debt. The cost of childcare now eats up as much as 10 percent of a two-parent family’s income in many states (as much as 14.3 percent in Oregon). And young people between the ages of 19 and 34 are the most likely population to be uninsured–not because they don’t want health benefits but because employers don’t offer them. A case in point: 63.3 percent of recent high school graduates had employer-provided healthcare in 1979, whereas just 33.7 percent had it in 2004.

“What we’re looking at is a situation where young people entered the recession already feeling the brunt of thirty years’ worth of pretty gradual but nonetheless dramatic economic and social changes,” says Nancy Cauthen, director of the Economic Opportunity Program at Demos. “The recession just made a bad situation worse.”

Today’s BLS positive employment news was welcome, but doesn’t change the fact that unemployment among young adults is at an all time high, much worse than for older age cohorts.  Sixteen to nineteen year old unemployment in March was 26%, twice what it was in March 2000.

An article in The Fiscal Times (“The American Dream Dilemma“, March 23) draws a vivid portrait of today’s Gen Y as ‘broke, unemployed, moving home, and living on food stamps.”  The part about living on food stamps appears to be no exaggeration. Salon magazine this week also offers an extensive profile of Millennials signing up for EBT cards from the government’s Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) , then attempting to satisfy their foodie and organic cravings once they have them (“Hipsters on Food Stamps“, March 15) — “Is it wrong to believe there should be a local, free-range chicken in every Le Creuset pot?”

Marketing to a target audience that faces true economic uncertainty is a challenge, especially a market that is used to thinking of what used to be considered ‘luxuries’ (cell phone and computer, high quality food, Internet access) as necessities.  They are trying to stay away from credit, using debit cards for purchases and cutting corners whenever possible.  Marketers who are winning are careful to explain the real benefits of their products, not just the sizzle. 

Despite their current dire straits, Millennials strongly believe better days are ahead. Marketers that reach out to them in meaningful ways now could reap significant benefits later.

Target is a retailer that seems to understand the Millennial “thrifty yet hip” mindset best.  According to Nielsen, Millennials are more inclined to shop there more often relative to other age groups as well as to outspdend them. (Nielsen, “Mining the Generations Gap“)

“Certain store banners hold a unique appeal for the younger generations, and Target is at the head of that retailing class. Target stores have managed to maintain a hip, trendy image with a strong value message with whimsical advertising; strong, almost pop art in-store merchandising; and a roster of high profile designers for everything from housewares (Michael Graves) to bedding (Todd Oldham) to women’s fashion (Mossimo) to cosmetics (Sonia Kashuk). And, with the interest in at-home meals, Target recently announced a new partnership with TV cook show host Giada De Laurentiis for a store-brand line of specialty food items and cookware.