According to Media Week, young people are processing information at lightning speeds.
Researcher Brent Magid says no other group of consumers will have as profound an impact on the media business over the next 10 years as the Millennial Generation, 9-to 28-year-olds, and he told promotion and marketing executives that it is imperative that they find a way to get their messages across to this group.
Magid, president and CEO of Frank M. Magid Associates, told an audience at the annual Promax conference in New York City today that this group, which numbers 79 million, one million more than the Baby Boomers in this country, have grown up using multiple media platforms at the same time, and need to be marketed to differently than the older Boomers. Magid said Millennials consume 20 hours of media a day, but that is all done within 7 hours of clock time.
Perhaps I’m a bit daft, but how do you consume 20 hours of media in a 7-hour window?
They say that people of this generation get information from multiple media at a time. For instance receiving an ad on an SMS while surfing a forum on the web with a banner on the top of the page, while listening to a podcast with the TV and radio on … At this rate, another good idea would be to make most ads about aspirin, though.
Given this multi-tasking kind of lifestsyle, how much interest or focus are these people giving any one of those media/information streams? It’s skimming, at best. Fifteen minutes of fame become fifteen seconds. Fifteen seconds become 1.5.
It leaves media in position of having to say, “Just throw as much out there as you can, and hope something sticks” – hardly an efficient way of spending dollars.
Perhaps the real trick in the world of “new media” isn’t going broader, but being even more focused, driving the spike even deeper into the few places where X truly marks the spot.
I recently participated in a panel on Millennials at the Digital Media Conference where we explored some similar themes. One point I make in a recent blog post is that though marketing to this generation may be extremely difficult, there are also opportunities to have more involved brand experiences that they are likely to pay attention to as long as it is not in an interruption marketing format. How we evolve from push marketing to making our messages available when this generation wants them will be the next challenge for advertisers who are often far too focused on “breaking through the clutter” to do the most simple thing: have your messages easily found by those that seek them.
Theo,
I like your idea of driving a deeper spike in this time of attention deficits. Don’t know if it would make sense to the Millennials, but it makes sense to me. I hate that I skim emails and articles, but there seems to be no other way for me to process the ever-expanding info load.