In your reading about Generation Y, you have undoubtedly seen piles and piles of publications and articles that proclaim this generation as marketing-savvy. I have also seen these articles; in fact, reading about my generation inspired me to launch this website.

Unfortunately, you and I have been gravely misled.

Some researcher, somewhere, decreed that since Gen Y grew up with advertising, they have grown thick-skinned to marketing. This made sense to journalists and media agencies everywhere, and thus began the wave of articles about how Gen Y was some kind of superintelligent consumer. These consumers are apparently like an antibiotic-resistant viral strain. Substitute where needed to make that analogy work.

Exposure does not make you an expert
I moved to Canada from the Philippines when I was ten. One of the first ads I saw on Canadian soil was in Pearson Airport, where a Toronto Maple Leafs player was posing in a “got milk?” poster. Hockey, I would soon find, was everywhere. Someone was always talking about it, every third commercial seemed to relate to it and my street was always home to pickup hockey.

The mere exposure to hockey did not make me hockey-savvy. I knew that whoever had more goals won the game, but I didn’t know anything about the strategy or tactics involved. I knew that Doug Gilmour was one of our best players, but I didn’t know what he did that made him “the best”. All I knew was that my friends liked him, so I also liked him.

Similarly, if someone grows up surrounded by advertising, does that make them advertising-savvy? Do they know the psychological tactics involved, the purpose of brand messages, and all the work that goes into making an ad say “you need to own this product“?

Generation Y is a bunch of marketing suckers
Gen Y’s lifelong exposure to media hasn’t “thickened their skin” to marketing. Lifelong exposure makes them accept advertising as a normal part of their lives. We were introduced to brands so early in life that they’ve contributed to large parts of our childhood. This exposure has taught us that it’s normal to become emotionally attached to brands. Hell, just writing about my childhood reminds me of McDonald’s Playplace and Happy Meals.

As advertising continues to slowly permeate every piece of our lives, kids are implicitly being raised by corporate logos and “brand experiences”. My two-year old nephew can’t even pronounce his own name, but whenever someone mentions “Toys R Us” he loses his mind.

The archetypes and values of this generation are embedded in commercials, slogans and marketing. Young, aspiring golfers don’t look up to Tiger Woods. They look up to Tiger Woods as sponsored by Nike.

by feastoffools

It’s no secret that Generation Y doesn’t blink when it comes to downloading music. The story of the day is not that teenagers and twentysomethings are loading their iPods with unpurchased music.

I consider myself a veteran digital native; I remember the internet as it was through a 14.4 modem. But I was astonished at the level of piracy that goes on today: a study concludes that 95% of Gen Y engage in piracy.

In the short-term, the music industry business model is nothing less than doomed. We all point and laugh, ridiculing the executives for their flat-footed ineptitude, but no one actually provides any solutions. Perhaps we’re all still angry at them for overpricing CDs and DVDs, so we smugly smile as the industry implodes. On a side note: Generation Y isn’t buying CDs either.

I encourage you to think about the consequences. At some point, artists will need to be compensated for their work; a concept I’m not sure youth understand when they hop on Limewire and download Miley Cyrus’ latest album.

The challenge for the music industry is more than thinking about how to monetize consumer behaviour. Another challenge lies as they argue for their own relevance; especially in these times where Radiohead and Nine Inch Nails continue to push for the industry’s obsolesence. There’s also a question of making consumers realize that someone has to pay these artists to produce music.

Until someone makes a compelling argument — be it Reznor or the RIAA — brokep and ThePirateBay have Gen Y’s attention.

Let’s forget consumer behavior and marketing for a second. How is the prevalence of internet porn going to change things in the future?

The incredible reach of the internet has given pornography near mainstream status. There are virtually no barriers to explicit material online. It seems like a celebrity sex tape is “leaked” every week.

Among college-age men, alcohol consumption is almost on par with pornography consumption. Roughly half of college-age women surveyed found pornography use acceptable, while only roughly a third of their fathers approved of it. See this journal article on (PDF) Generation XXX for more interesting tidbits.

In North American culture, sex sells. Are we eventually going to get bored of it? What effect might this have?

Slowly and surely, every social situation is developing a digital doppleganger.

We can all recall the teenage awkwardness of being seen at the mall with your mom. It’s always a strange feeling when you get a Facebook friend request from someone from another generation. Many Generation Y users see social networks as a sandbox for their indiscretions — so how do they respond to a request from someone they know, but outside their immediate peer group? Many millennials are not pleased with how older folk are signing up for social networks.

Reading the comments from that article raises some interesting talking points. Facebook is such a fantastic tool for keeping in touch that it was inevitable for all age groups to join the fun. Who are we to prevent our aunts, bosses, teachers from getting on Facebook? They have lives, friends and pictures to share.

After all, it is their generation that built the internet, along with the iPod, cellphones…and every other digital thing we take for granted. Who are we to be ashamed to let them in? This is just another generational clash, but unlike anything we’ve seen before. Normally, when the soccer moms take on a trend, it dies a quick death (see: Macarena, along with the phrases “Bling Bling” and “You Go Girl”). But no one is predicting social networks to go away any time soon.

If you can manage to look past the scorn in her tone, Kay Hymowitz provides an interesting glimpse at the child-man. Did your daughter go through a bad break-up recently, Kay? Anyway…

In her tirade, Kay denounces the senior cohort of Generation Y males for their “irresponsible” behaviour. Instead of fruitless endeavours such as video games, television and anything remotely entertaining, men should be focusing on their careers and marriage. According to Kay, the two are mutually exclusive and impossible to reconcile. But since the latter is the “right” thing to do, the choice is clear.

I could go on. Kay does raise valid points regarding the delaying of traditional “adulthood” in men, but the same can easily be said for women.

The issue here is not really about Millenial men or women, but about how the values of her generation are no longer the standard. Her anger is how Generation Y is redefining the rules — indeed, how every emerging generation redefines rules — and how the norms and beliefs her generation held are slowly becoming irrelevant.

At the end of the day…you can fight, lecture and ridicule generations that don’t agree with your worldview. That, however, simply marks you as a coot, the embodiment of the old scary grandmother who yells at the playing kids to get off her lawn.

“Can I get your phone number, starting with the area code?”

No.

I can’t remember the amount of times I’ve given businesses fake information. Offline and especially online. And I am not alone — I recall a time sitting in my university library where two girls were trying to get an article off the Wall Street Journal and ran into a registration roadblock.

Overhearing a few expletives…I scurried over to WSJ.com to see what the fuss was about. And then there it was — 4 pages of registration information to fill out just to see content. So what did they do? They filled out useless, junk information so they could jump through 4 pages of hoops.

And wouldn’t you know it, while I was checking out the website and filling in my own fake information, I noticed that the options to subscribe to emails were pre-selected. I know they’re just trying to bump up their subscriber base, but most of those subscribers don’t want those emails and just click through to see the content they want.

Why was this such an unnecessarily painful experience? Both sides lose. I lose time filling out junk info, and you get junk info.

Generation Y is a horde of consumers who don’t care about you collecting CRM, especially if it just impedes the process of getting what they want. Don’t waste our time — you’ll end up wasting your own.

One of the things that people on my Facebook constantly post is the Dove “Evolution” ad. Each and every time it is posted, compliments and praises come in droves, exalting the virtues of Dove finally telling it like it is.

Whenever this happens, I play the party pooper. I step in and pull back the curtain on “Evolution”, on Dove, on Unilever. I let everyone know that Unilever — Dove’s parent company — also is the home of Axe Body Spray. The same Axe Body Spray that portray beautiful women as thin, C-cupped, symetrically-faced and sex-starved.

Every Generation Y analyst loves to say how Gen Y is the generation that is marketing-savvy. Apparently, growing up exposed to mass media has somehow made us invulnerable to blatant marketing ploys.

But this is not the case. Just like any generation of consumers, we’ll still be wowed by great creatives, despite the fact that they are simply superficial marketing tactics.

Dove: Evolution

Axe Body Spray: Bow Chika Wow

The “magic” of Christmas diminishes as I get older. Instead of soaking it all in as I did as a youth, I now think about costs: time needed to organize a family get-together, planning gifts and shopping trips, and various other details you could put on a balance sheet if you were a nerd accounting-inclined.

The biggest change I’ve noticed from childhood is the how secular Christmas has become. This is clearly depicted in a city like Toronto, where our need to satisfy every culture has led us to debate whether “Christmas trees” are really “Holiday trees”.

The recent rise in twentysomething atheism in the USA might be an indicator of things to come. What effect will this have on Generation Y?

Generation Y’s formative years were spent watching the Spice Girls, Britney Spears and countless shirtless boy bands gyrating in water fountains. Friends, an immensely popular show in the 1990s, depicted twentysomethings having new sexual partners on a weekly basis. And then there’s a man named Bill, who received some minor press for a few incidents involving an intern, a blue dress and a cigar.

The effect of this mass exposure to sexualized images is a generation that has relaxed attitudes towards risqué creatives. Take, for example, the following spots that aired on Canadian TV:

Dentyne Fire – “Parents”

This spot earned Cadbury Adams (who owns the Dentyne brand) a place as a Finalist in the 2005 Bessies.

After the spot aired, there was a significant jump in Dentyne’s share in the category. Source (PDF).

Contrast those results with another sexualized commercial, this time targeting the members of Generation X.

Kia Spectra – “Police”

The spot caused waves in the media, but for other reasons. The ad was pulled after several complaints.

One thing to keep in mind amidst all the flesh and saliva in the media today: the younger generation will always have more liberal values than its predecessor. Just as rock music and first-date kisses enraged the parents of yesteryear, Millennials are doing all the same things to anger their elders.

The only difference is that they put these things on YouTube.

Hi! I’m Red Bull Energy Drink.

Athletes don’t take me as seriously as Gatorade (or even its ugly cousin Powerade), but trust me when I say that I can give you that extra kick you need when you’re drinking when you need an all-night study session!

I have promotions/advertising reps that show up at cool nightlife spots to emphasize the thinly-veiled fact that I am a mixer/chaser remind my target demographic that my only function is to “temporarily increase alertness”.

Legal-aged youth of Generation Y, Red Bull is truly the Jagerbomb!