How Millennials can change Madison Av.
August 27, 2010 on 6:33 am | In Advertising |Listen in on most brand planning meetings and one word comes up over and over — Millennials. Sometimes called GenY or EchoBoomers, this is the generation born between 1982 and 2000. Millennials are no longer on the playground; they’re running companies (Mark Zuckerberg), entertaining (Rihanna) and winning Olympic Gold (Shaun White). To marketers, Millennials represent a 76 million-strong, brand-conscious demographic.
Recently, however, I’ve started viewing this generation through a new lens. Beyond being a coveted media target, the very characteristics that define this generation make them extremely well-equipped to redesign the modern advertising agency.
Why? Because Millennials are widely viewed as a generation of collaborative, tech-savvy, multicultural, problem-solvers — the very skills necessary to address the questions marketers voice about their advertising agencies.
To illustrate the opportunity, let’s examine some of the defining traits of Millennials, as outlined by Lynn Lancaster and David Stillman in their recent book, &"The M-Factor,&" and examine how a career in advertising meshes with these values.
Millennials are inherently collaborative: This is a generation that believes &"we is greater than me.&" They’ve been working in teams since kindergarten as classrooms emphasized group participation. Soccer became the suburbs’ biggest after-school sport because it prizes team flow. Advertising is a great profession for people who thrive on collaboration. The agencies that are succeeding are those that have banished silos, where media, creative and strategy form one big mosh pit of ideas.
Millennials are the first multicultural generation: This generation has grown up in a time in which the United States experienced dramatic growth in immigration and racial integration. Multiculturalism is simply a fact of life for this group, reinforced early on by &"Sesame Street,&" and later in the classroom, as well as in film and music. Let’s face a hard truth: The advertising industry needs to do a better job when it comes to diversity. This is not simply a politically correct goal — it is an economic imperative. We’re in the business of helping clients connect with main street America. Agencies succeeded at this over the decades largely because we mirrored the face of America. This may no longer be true. Millennials can help improve our ability to connect with multicultural America.
Millennials want to be innovators and problem-solvers: Marketers hire us because the lines on the graph are heading the wrong way. At the core, advertising professionals solve problems by inspiring clients to embrace new solutions. More and more, these solutions involve online, mobile and social media. Millennials have been training for this job since birth.
Millennials want to feel they are contributing: Boomers and Xers often label Millennials a needy group requiring constant feedback. To be sure, this is a generation that received trophies for simply participating, not to mention endless reinforcement from their &"helicopter parents.&" Advertising is an excellent career for people who thrive on instant feedback. Whether you’re writing the TV spot, mapping the online user experience or crunching the numbers for the media plan, your work is out there for all to immediately applaud or critique.
Millennials want a job in which they can be heard: On the night before a pitch, a great idea knows no title. If you are a so-called &"junior&" and feel you have the answer, despite the fact that your title has half the syllables as that of your boss, shout it out and be prepared to defend your point of view. Come ready to play.
Millennials want to make a difference in the world: Like it or not, we live in a consumer culture bombarded by media in all its forms. Young professionals can get intimately involved in creating marketing ideas that make a difference. Witness Pepsi’s strategy to crowd-source world-changing ideas, Target’s support of the arts, Best Buy’s @15 teen program, or Ford’s support of the Susan G. Komen Foundation.
Millennials want to express who they are through work: An agency is like high school for grown-ups. You can earn social currency through your individual sense of style, taste in music, tattoos or social causes. We really don’t care if you are gay, straight, indie, emo, conservative or downright crazy, just as long as you come through when it counts.
To capitalize on this opportunity, the advertising industry must begin making a clear case why this profession should attract this generation’s best and brightest. After all, this is a career that stands at the nexus of business, media, entertainment, technology, pop culture and any and all new trends.
Most importantly, senior leaders of advertising agencies should stop dwelling on what they had to do back in the day to get ahead and instead unleash the creativity of the twenty-somethings buried in their agencies.
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8/29/2010
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