Posts Tagged ‘millennials’
Facebook and The Transparency Bandwagon
While the tinfoil hatters amongst us who fear the divestiture of liberty keep pointing to the likes of the Patriot Act, the US Census or Google’s caching of every search known to man, the real worry for all of us should be Facebook. Well, all of us that aren’t in marketing, at least. The truth is that the “new openness” that Facebook is propagating has two wildly untapped (and yet genius) ideas at its core.
First of all, it’s tapping into a generational zeitgeist. There’s just something about Millennials that make them not only prone to share intricate details about their lives (and subsequently making them wide open for identity theft) but also willing to let that information be used to help them connect to better products. They don’t feel sold, the feel catered to. And for the generation that lives at home until almost 30, takes their parents to interviews and has never used a card catalog system in a library, why would they expect anything else? This notion of “openness” is also a major tenet of successful social campaigns over the past several years. A certain current president of ours ran on such a platform (never mind that it’s not practiced) to wild acclaim and popularity among Millennials. The concept of opennness is really driven by the use of the web in general, and since Facebook is the standard bearer for all things social, web-oriented and open, why shouldn’t they be the first to sally forth into such unknown territory?
The second thing it taps into is the kind of low-cost targeting that marketers are salivating for. Never mind that Millennials (and that oh-so-coveted 18-35 year old audience) are incredibly difficult to nail down and push your message at, this additional, product and brand-centric style of targeting gives Facebook the ultimate power in the universe to wield over desperate media wonks and marketing directors alike. They will be able to give you more targeted information about their users and segment users better than even Google. It’s staggeringly simple and genius at the same time. About 18 months ago when Facebook made a huge push to be the “login credentials of choice” for hundreds of sites across the internet, it seemed odd. But this, now, makes perfect sense. If Google is out to “organize the world’s information,” then Facebook is out to “segment the world’s people into highly targeted and affordable lists for companies to purchase and profit from.”
But the reality is that Google is loosing its sheen as a kind of do-gooder company. After their initial IPO, people loved everything they did. Now, after a few fumbles with their Android software updates, a couple censorship issues in China and some sneaky backroom stuff with the White House later, Google is mirroring a corporate image as opposed to a warm, smart startup. Whereas Facebook, well, they still have Mark Zuckerburg’s warm, childish face to be the, um, face of their company. They are the living expression of relationships in the 21st century. Therefore, how could we so demonize them? This, mind you, is after the Beacon fiasco of a few years back. They learned and got more sneaky about it. But they’re still tallying buckets of information about you that you are willingly giving them. We, as consumers, are blind to it because it is leading to us getting better access to deals and brands we want. In fact, the level of data that Facebook is able to gather on its 411 million users makes Google’s data from search look more like geo-targeting by zip code. It’s good, but beaten by emerging standards.
And you were afraid of the government.
Did they get it right?
For most social media skeptics out there (see everybody not peddling social media like it’s the next incarnation of the television), there’s an enormously growing amount of speculation that Twitter isn’t the social tool that social media folks say it’s going to be. I would lump myself into said category, as well. And while the Brand Bowl 2010 is a really nice concept, both for a show of technology and agency prowess, I think it’s the wrong metric and the wrong thing to show expertise in.
Brand Bowl 2010
Let me explain. Everybody who’s anybody is angling for the next best thing in the ad business. Whether it be one of the various and sundry social applications on the web, say twitter, yelp, ning, digg, delicious, etc, etc, etc, brands can’t afford to be the farm on just one of these. Because, in truth, the social media application doesn’t matter if it doesn’t hit the target audience well. So, let’s use the “results” from Brand Bowl as an example. The Focus on the Family spot, which was quite possibly the most controversial and tame spot in Super Bowl memory, got lots of love in the Twittersphere. Why? It was both controversial AND it bore the exact subject matter that people oft tweet about: politics, religion and controversy. So, naturally, it would grade high on that scale. However, that does nothing to monitor effectiveness, strength of message or any other necessary metric to determine ROI on a Super Bowl spot.
All that’s really to say is that I truly believe anybody still putting Twitter in any sort of elevated status in the social media sphere has it all wrong. Most people who work in brand building in any sort don’t believe it has much longer of a shelf life in terms of the overall brand discussion. It faded quicker than MySpace and most younger consumers are onto something else. I wouldn’t have used it to measure effectiveness of anything. But that’s me.
Really good stereotypers
Recently, I’ve been working on a minority-focused campaign, and it’s done nothing but made me ask lots of questions. Now, for a typical white guy working in the ad industry, I am blessed to both work for a minority-owned firm and have very candid relationships with several black people I work with, which means they will give me nothing but honest feedback on whether or not an idea is treading too close to that mythical line of offensiveness. And for our whole creative team, that’s an invaluable asset. But this process has made me analyze the way other brands flail in their attempts to market to segments by ethnography instead of demography. All that’s to say: I don’t think anybody is getting minority-targeted marketing right.
Finally: My letter to the editor in Harvard Business Review
I submitted this content back in March, and it’s just now making it to the presses. The good people at HBR were extremely good to work with, even when they cut out 1/2 the content of my letter. What can I say? They said keep it under 400 words, and I kept it at 397.
Here’s the text:
Gen Y in the Workforce
Dear Editor:
If you take a step back and analyze the situation objectively, there seems to be something broken in the way companies approach Millennials (see Tamara J. Erickson’s article “Gen Y in the Workforce,” February 2009). What typically starts out as nothing more than a lack of understanding often grows into an opinion that Gen Y is simply a lazy, disrespectful lot.
Gen Xers and Baby Boomers view their jobs the same way: You are what you do. Today’s younger workforce, however, has the exact opposite perspective: Millennials see their jobs as an extension of their lives, not the other way around. And since their lives are fast-paced, communication-saturated, friend-rich, and change-filled, they have high hopes that their jobs will mirror that lifestyle. So why wouldn’t they be disenchanted when they haven’t gotten a promotion after six months on the job and when they get in trouble for Facebooking at work? They expect more from their jobs than a paycheck, but few managers are willing to give it to them. Millennials want to believe in what they are doing and want to know they are being heard.
While coddling is certainly not the answer, flexibility and accountability are. Remember, this is the generation that was force-fed group projects at every level of education, from elementary school through graduate programs, so how could we expect them not to be convinced that vertical collaboration is the best way to solve a problem?
Mark Ervin
Director of Creative
o2ideas
Birmingham, Alabama