Alexandra Gombar cannot remember a time before the internet existed. Since the first-year student at the University of North Carolina was born, people have been browsing Yahoo, finding rentals on Craigslist and shopping on Amazon.com. The 18-year-old seldom watches television programmes on a TV set. She rarely buys music albums or books. She does not subscribe to magazines or newspapers. Yet she expects videos, songs, books and blogs to be available at the touch of a screen.
Gombar belongs to the first generation of adults that does not know life without instant messages or access to the web. They have documented their teenage years on social media. They live in a non-demand media world. And they are disrupting the foundations of the entertainment and marketing industries.
The media side
“They see through the marketing bullshit in 20 seconds. We’ve had to unlearn everything,” says David Jones, Chief Executive of the advertising group Havas.
Much has been written, debated and discussed about the so-called millennials, those born between the early 1980s and 2000, who are now aged 13 to 33. A hotly-debated Time magazine cover story called them the “Me Me Me Generation that still lives with parents but will save us all”.
These digital natives have been described as optimistic, entitled, civic-minded, narcissistic, confident and self-expressive. Rapid technological changes, coupled with a coming-of-age amid the economic crisis, shaped their world views. Three-quarters of the group owns a smartphone. They are also considered better educated, more socially responsible and globally connected. Yet they are shackled by student loans and face a dismal job market.
Media and ad executives are fixated on projections that by next year, millennials will make up more than half of the all-important 18 to 49 audience that advertisers are eager to target. They are not debating whether the millennials will grow up and settle into the same media patterns as their parents but rather how different they really are.
A decade ago, media executives were wringing their hands over a generation of Napster users who pirated music. > While piracy remains a problem, the rise of new services such as Netflix for online video and Spotify for music demonstrates that this group of young adults is more willing to pay for access to content.
“The Napster generation was born in a vacuum with no technology that could prevent piracy. Now there are better technologies and young people are more willing to pay,” says Matt Britton, chief executive of MRY, a youth-focused ad agency owned by Publicis. “Access is more important than ownership for this group. They value experiences versus owning things.”
New habits
The millennials’ greatest media habit is their spending far more time watching video on demand via digital recorders, web streams or mobile phones than TV. Chris Cutler, a 19-year-old student at Chapman University in California, says that except for live sports, he streams nearly all of his favourite programmes via Netflix or HBO GO, the network’s streaming service for subscribers. “That satisfies me,” he says.
That means large numbers of younger millennials have no use for traditional paid TV subscriptions. While some media executives argue that millennials will start subscribing once they move into their own homes, several youth experts say that notion is a risky assumption.
“Patterns form when you are 20 years old,” says Matthew Diamond, chief executive of Alloy Digital, the youth-focused media and marketing group. “We are conditioning a whole generation that this is how they consume media.”
Instead of channel-surfing, millennials are spending their time with “venture content”, which gives them a role in creating the programming, says Jamie Gutfreund, chief strategy officer at The Intelligence Group, a youth-focused consumer insights firm owned by the Creative Artists Agency. She points to AwesomenessTV, now owned by DreamWorks Animation that boasts more than 872,000 subscriptions and features a wide array of short, edgy programming, from fashion to gaming and sports.
The model is a hit among younger millennials, Gutfreund says, because they are involved with creating the episodes through questions and comments. The videos are often short clips, with the plots more simplistic than the carefully crafted 30-minute traditional TV shows.
“In a fantastic old world there was must-see TV, but we don’t have must-see TV any more,” Gutfreund says. “Entertainment is not just people creating things and putting it out there. People want to feel like they have a say. They want to be involved. We are becoming a nation of customised consumption,” she adds.
Sports and live cultural events are growing in importance. This is a generation that has popularised the sharing economy and social currency comes with being in the know and sharing that knowledge on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram.
Take America’s National Football League. Millions of US millennials regularly tune in to watch NFL games. But they are 50 per cent more likely to visit the NFL on Facebook and 59 per cent more likely to have shared NFL.com.
The proliferation of always-on, always-accessible content is creating a new problem: a content glut. Millennials report feeling ridden with angst about keeping up. To cope, Gutfreund says, millennials “binge view” TV programmes for hours at a time or conduct “media wipeouts” where they clear the DVR or Netflix queue to stay current.
Market facts
Media companies and marketers are rushing to adapt. They are creating new story formats, designed for people to watch several episodes back-to-back. The new season of Arrested Development is expected to deploy some of these strategies. It also means the end of the cliffhanger, a staple of serialised entertainment since the radio era.
Amid this fast-changing environment, the types of marketing that best resonate with millennials are not standard 30-second commercials but rather stories or actual products sponsored or created by the marketers. This includes fast-food chain Chipotle’s Scarecrow campaign, an animated short film and a companion mobile game app highlighting the dangers of processed food.
These campaigns make their way into the social media news stream — a way to reach this audience that is less likely to be parked in front of a TV or listening to a traditional radio broadcast.
— Financial Times
