Welcome
to the New
Millennials
They don’t remember life before the Internet. Their worldview has been shaped
by pivotal world events like 9/11, Hurricane Katrina and the Iraq War, making
them the most civic-minding generation since World War II. They’re accepting of diversity, perhaps because more than one-third are minorities themselves.
Welcome to the world of the Millennials, also
known as Generation Y. Definitions vary, but it’s
generally considered to be the more than 81 million
Americans born between 1982 and 2002, making it
the largest generation to come along since the Baby
Boomers.
Clearly, any demographic this size is one that companies don’t want to ignore. Minneapolis-based consumer strategy firm Iconoculture estimates the direct
spending power of the Millennials to be an astounding
$1.3 trillion. But according to Bill Carter, a partner
at Burlington, Vt.-based Fuse Marketing, that doesn’t
even begin to tell the story of this generation’s marketing clout. “Research indicates that the influence of this
group is five times its direct spending power, because
these kids are so technologically savvy, their parents
go to them for product advice on things like computers
and personal entertainment devices,” he says.
Although these free-spending, techno-savvy kids
sound like every marketer’s fantasy, there’s a catch:
first, you’ve got to get their attention. “There’s so
much clutter in the world of advertising that it’s hard
to break through,” says Matt Britton, a founding partner at Mr. Youth LLC in New York.
Not only that, this is a generation that consumes
media in extremely fragmented ways, making it less
straightforward a reach for marketers. For example,
while Millennials still watch TV, it no longer gets
their undivided attention. According to The Kids’ Social Networking Study by Grunwald Associates LLC,
64 percent of respondents said they go online while
watching the box — and only 11 percent said that the
TV was their primary focus when they were watching.
“These kids live in a choice environment,” explains
Nancy Robinson, vice president of consumer strategies
at Iconoculture. “What’s interesting is that they aren’t
suffering from choice fatigue. For them, choice isn’t a
distraction — it’s a good thing.”
A Fading Attention Span
Getting their attention isn’t the only problem
— you’ve got to keep their attention, too. An April
2006 JupiterResearch study found that 33 percent
of consumers shopping online via a broadband connection will abandon a site if a page takes more than
four seconds to load. “The attention span is short and
getting shorter,” said Pedro Santos, senior manager of
industry marketing for Akamai, based in Cambridge,
Mass. “Having the consumer wait an extra second can
mean the difference between them purchasing your
