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FROM MASS TO MILLENNIALS

In a YouTube video called “Marc Ecko Tags Air Force One,” two hooded graffiti artists spray paint the president’s private plane with the words “Still Free.” The video was shot at in the dark of night, and the images are shaky and grainy, suggesting that the camera is hand-held and shot by an amateur. Adding to the “authenticity” is the lack of audio save for periodic heavily-exerted breathing, coming either from the cameraperson or from the graffiti artists after they jump over a barbed wire fence and sprint to the plane to avoid detection from the military guards who protect the area. The video ends with an exhortation to find out more at stillfree.com.

Many who saw the video were appalled. Spraypaint the plane of the President of the United States? How utterly disrespectful. It could never happen . . . or could it? The responses on YouTube show people’s confusion, with comments running the gamut from “it’s a fake” to “this was a video game promotion” to “it was real moron.” In fact, it was a fake. The video was produced by hot New York ad agency Droga5—it’s been named agency of the year seven times—and as founder David Droga put it, the video “was done 100 percent to exploit news channels . . . I knew the average news network would want to believe it was real.”¹ This is what cutting-edge marketing is today: a tool to get people talking by any means possible, be it confusing the consumer or junking up the news with over-the-top PR trickery.

Marc Ecko said he created the video and website to protest graffiti laws throughout the United States. Maybe he did, but that’s hard to swallow, given that an advertising agency produced it. Rather than protest a policy, this short film portrayed the fashion designer as cutting-edge, hip, anti-establishment. These attributes marry well with his brand and with the new age of advertising, which puts products and brands into unexpected places doing unexpected things. In this new marketing model, social media, experiential marketing, stunts, and public relations take precedence over traditional, straightforward sales messages.

Marketers have turned to these types of murky tactics in response to advertising avoidance: consumers’ ability to circumvent commercial messages, whether that involves flipping past a commercial or paying for subscriptions to services like Netflix or Amazon Prime. As more content goes online, we have increased our use of ad blockers, like Adblock Plus, Blur (formerly DoNotTrackMe), Disconnect, and Ghostery.² Already more than half of all Americans record TV shows so that they can skip past commercials, and the number of people watching online to avoid ads is rapidly increasing. We unsubscribe, unlike, or stop following brands that we once opted into 91 percent of the time.³ “There’s a growing realization that we’re being trained to be blind to advertising,” says Mark Popkiewicz, CEO of British-based advertising company Mirriad.⁴ In fact, the term for that online is banner blindness. The ads are there, but we just don’t see them.

Who can blame us? Advertising has invaded every corner of our lives. No longer limited to TV, radio, magazines or billboards, advertising now also covers buildings, cars, and even the floors of our local drugstore: what marketers call “ambient marketing.” In a similar vein, theaters, parks, museums, and arenas sell naming rights to raise revenue, so we no longer go to places called Shea Stadium or the Helen Hayes, we go to CitiField or the American Airlines Theater. And as if real advertising were not invasive enough, marketers digitally insert ads into TV shows where they do not actually exist. You are likely most familiar with this in baseball games, where the billboard behind the batter is revised throughout the game. But this does not only happen in sports. CGI logos and products are also used in television dramas and sitcoms, which have the added benefit of enabling advertisers to insert products after the show has finished production. If Pepsi wants a can of soda inserted into a scene in your favorite show, no problem. Simply digitally incorporate it into the program. This capability also lets products be customized for individual markets around the world—a Bentley in the UK becomes a Mitsubishi in Brazil.⁵

It’s not just that ads are everywhere. We are targets for promotion from day one. Companies use a cradle-to-grave marketing strategy, striving to get their products to us from the moment we are born until we go to the Great Beyond. Viacom is a good example of this. There is Nickelodeon for kids, Teen Nick and MTV for teens, VH1 for twenty-year-olds, TV Land for senior citizens, and Comedy Central for everybody. Another example is Disney. The company gives gifts to new mothers when they leave the hospital, markets to kids ad nauseum from toddlerhood into teen years, has created a line of bridal wear as well as a thriving business around theme park weddings, and instills guilt in grandparents if they do not take their offspring to Orlando as a rite of passage, like going to Mecca or Jerusalem. This strategy is not limited to entertainment companies. It pervades the corporate landscape and is used by Apple, McDonald’s, Coca-Cola, and Target, to name just a few.

Until now, though, advertising has been obvious, and because of that you had the choice to interact with it or not. Recognizable configurations enabled you to readily distinguish advertising from programming content: TV ads are typically fifteen to thirty seconds in length, and there are only a handful of advertising formats, such as slice of life (Volkswagen’s “Darth Vader” commercial or the Honey Maid “This is wholesome” ad), testimonials (someone endorses the product), or demonstrations (Wisk takes out “ring around the collar”). In print, there is typically a large main visual on the page, a headline, perhaps some body copy, and a “hero shot” of the product. While those traditional ads will continue to exist, they are becoming the exception. They are simply too easy to evade.

So marketers are concealing their messages. Yes, to combat ad avoidance, but that’s not the only reason. As more and more advertising money moves out of television and newspapers and into digital, traditional media have had to come up with ways to replace that significant lost revenue. This has led to more and more advertising of the black ops variety—corporately sponsored content masquerading as news and entertainment.

Serving up those ads are social media, which is best suited to one-to-one, subtle communications rather than advertising that screams at you and begs you to buy a product. Remember: “Social media is for social, not for selling.” Therefore, marketers have evolved from communicating with large undifferentiated masses to communicating with individuals whose behaviors are well known to them because the marketers have been stealthily listening in on their conversations and tracking their every digital move. Of particular interest to marketers are the demographic known as Millennials, because they have so willingly embraced these social spaces.

In this chapter, we will look at the progressive encroaching of advertising messages into media content. Product placement, also known as branded entertainment or more broadly as advertainment, has a long history in film and television.⁶ Now, as this practice transitions into online spaces, it becomes far less recognizable.

FROM PRODUCT PLACEMENT TO IMMERSIVE SOCIAL EXPERIENCE

Product placement occurs when companies pay to have their brand included in media content, historically in movies and television shows, and today also in video games, music videos, and most forms of digital content. The technique has been used in film since the 1890s, but became broad standard practice after Reese’s Pieces appeared in Steven Spielberg’s E.T., leading to a 66 percent increase in sales of the candy.⁷ Since then, we have seen movies jammed full of products, from the James Bond series of movies (which are famous for having dozens of product tie-ins) to Wayne’s World to The Lego Movie, which is in essence a two-hour commercial for a children’s product, but which also found space to include family-friendly products from companies like Apple, DC Comics, the NBA, and Lucasfilm, among others. Morgan Spurlock, a documentarian famous for making Super Size Me, produced a documentary called The Greatest Movie Ever Sold, a film completely financed by product placement. (He also produced a film called Mansome about male grooming, which he claimed was independent. Later he admitted the film had corporate support after reviewers speculated that it had been underwritten by Gillette—a prime example of content confusion.) As film production costs increased to an average of $100 million, product placement became a go-to method to offset those expenses, either through payment by the product sponsor or through in-kind donations, such as Apple providing free iPhones and Airbooks to decorate a set.

On television, Survivor is typically noted as one of the first programs to propel the use of product placement in recent decades. Producer Mark Burnett had no choice: he wanted to get the show on the air, and CBS would only accept it if he could bring advertisers on board with him. At the time, CBS was struggling in the ratings and having a hard time getting advertisers for their traditional scripted programming. How were they going to sell an advertiser on an untested reality series, a format that was virtually unheard of at the time? Burnett took the network up on their offer and integrated a number of popular consumer brands into the program. Contestants who hadn’t brushed their teeth in weeks would be given a challenge where the prize was a basket of Crest mouthwash, for which they were exceedingly grateful, or contestants won Doritos and Mountain Dew, which seemed like ambrosia after eating bugs or twigs or whatever else they could forage in the wilds of some exotic island.

Survivor was just the beginning. The show premiered in 2000, a year after TiVo was introduced. TiVo—and more broadly, digital video recorders—were slow to gain acceptance. By 2007, they were still in only 17 percent of U.S. households. Even so, television networks were concerned about what this technology might do to their business of getting eyeballs in front of advertising, because viewers could easily skip over commercials. While people had been able to do this using VCRs, DVRs simplified the recording process in a way that VCRs never could. Today, DVRs are in 48 percent of U.S. households. On the plus side for marketers, people who use DVRs watch more television; the downside is that they’re less likely to watch the accompanying advertising, as 60 percent of DVR users skip commercials.⁸ So if people are watching more TV but viewing fewer ads, the answer was obvious: put the product into the show itself.⁹

Product placement is now rampant. Global spending reached more than $10.5 billion in 2014, which was up 13.6 percent from the previous year.¹⁰ Modern Family plugs Prius and iPads, The Walking Dead pushes Hyundai, and 30 Rock shamelessly plugged everything from Verizon to Snapple, but does so with tongue-in-cheek. And who can forget the moment when Oprah Winfrey gave away cars—Pontiac G6s—to everyone in her audience, saying, “You get a car and you get a car and you get a car”? Somehow this seemed less offensive because every car recipient was presented as so deserving. Even online-only programs like Orange Is the New Black and House of Cards have bought into this, with the latter being so besieged with brand endorsements that the LA Times dubbed the show the “house of product placement.”¹¹

Most blatant are reality series, particularly contest-based programs. Starbucks cups sit in the armrests of the judges’ chairs on The Voice, and Coke adorns the set of American Idol, whose contestants help to create Ford commercials: the making of these ads becomes a lengthy segment of the show. After American Idol, the biggest winner is The Biggest Loser, which has more than five hundred product occurrences per season. At approximately eighteen episodes per season, that equals thirty product mentions or product appearances per show.

To get an idea not only of how pervasive but of how embedded and subtle this has become, try this exercise I use with my students: watch one of the two-hour morning news programs and count how many times a product is being pitched to you. Do not count the commercials or the traditional marketing tools like billboards that say “This segment brought to you by Smuckers,” but rather the less blatant forms of promotion. Is CBS doing a story about football because it is a news story, or because they have the rights to the NFL? And while you are at it, are they taking a less critical view of what is going on in the league than other news outlets? Is the athlete on “Good Morning America” talking about her sport, or about her new clothing line? If you do this sort of content analysis, you will find that very little of what appears on morning “news” contains anything of the sort.

Beyond building simple brand awareness in a way that’s less intrusive and more economical than traditional advertising, marketers have good reason to use product placement.¹² Most people now watch television with another device present: 84 percent of Americans use mobile phones as a second screen while watching TV.¹³ We may be checking email or posting to Facebook, but we also buy products: “Seventeen percent of consumers use secondary devices to purchase products featured on the programs they watch.”¹⁴

But isn’t this just like a commercial? Don’t we know we’re being pitched when we see the Coke can on the table or the lingering close-up on the car logo? Well, yes and no. Part of the reason why product placement is effective is that we tend to approach entertainment differently than we do advertising. Advertising is biased, so we look at it with our critical wits intact. Not so with entertainment. With product placement—and with all advertising to some extent—we don’t have to consciously remember the product in order for it to influence our attitude toward the brand. This is particularly true if the product appears multiple times.¹⁵ More important, according to Richard Heslin, professor of psychology at Purdue University, “When we watch a movie or something on television, our defenses are down and we become more receptive to the messages that are coming at us.”¹⁶ So if we see a product—say, GoPro cameras—used on sports programs, we might say to ourselves, “Wow! ABC Sports thinks these guys are great. Maybe I should get one.” It doesn’t work that way with an ad. If we see the product in a commercial, we are acutely aware of it, and we are more likely to think “that’s cool.” But before dropping hundreds of dollars for the camera, we’ll go check other sources of trusted information for verification of its worth. If our favorite character in a show is casually using an iPhone or a celebrity nonchalantly wears a product, we do not think of it as an endorsement, and we tend to accept it, as we do editorial content or the TV show itself—an important idea to keep in mind when we look at content marketing.

Another place where this psychological mechanism plays out in untold measure is celebrity endorsements, particularly those made via social media. Public relations firms that have long worked with celebrities have added content integration to their toolkit. For example, Bang & Olufsen (B&O) wanted to introduce their high-end headphones (BeoPlay H6) to the U.S. market, so they hired Kari Feinstein Public Relations (KFPR). This company is well known for their “Style Lounges,” events held at major film festivals and award shows where companies pay to get their products in front of celebrities. For B&O, KFPR used a combination of their Style Lounge, editorial press, social media, and product seeding (aka product placement) to drive awareness of the headphones. They got the product into the hands of celebrities like Aaron Paul from Breaking Bad, who posted a picture of himself wearing the headphones on his Instagram account. Importantly, he does not mention the headphones; he is just casually wearing them around his neck. Dozens of other celebrities and online influencers did the same, until it appeared that the headphones were everywhere. According to KFPR’s website, Bang & Olufsen ended up with 1.2 million “Likes,” 450 million press impressions, and 120 million online impressions, for a total of 570 million impressions, or more than half a billion people being exposed to the headphones—all without traditional advertising.¹⁷

The practice of seeding products to generate press impressions is not new. What is new is the concerted effort to combine celebrity product endorsements with the ability to track the number of people engaging with the product. Oliver Luckett of theAudience Agency explained how this works to Douglas Rushkoff in his Frontline documentary Generation Like: “What we do is we basically run the social media on behalf of entertainers and artists and musicians and actors, and we help them express themselves inside of this medium.”¹⁸ (There are no statistics on this, but you can be pretty sure that your favorite celebrity is not writing his or her own content.) Not only do they manage the social component, but theAudience also produces content, like music videos, and then inserts products into that content. With Luckett’s help, celebrities are reaching millions of fans and generating hundreds of thousands of pieces of content, which is something brands want to be attached to. Not only that, because of data analytics and “Likes,” it is possible to determine the intersection between companies and celebrities, and that crossover can be exploited. As Luckett explained, “So if you’re connected to Ian [Somerhalder of Vampire Diaries] and he likes the product, and then you like Ian and you like the product, then now you’ve got a double endorsement to your friends.”¹⁹ This, of course, should make us wonder why a celebrity “Likes” a particular brand and who’s paying them to do so. Not only that: all those “Like” buttons you’ve been casually clicking are in truth not about demonstrating your interests, but are instead a deceptive means to update product placement in the digital age.

Marketers love all of this because it has made their lives easier. Tracking product placement used to be hard work, and few companies could account for the value of product insertions. Now marketers can have the information sent to their desktops, and return on their investment (ROI) can be assessed instantaneously. Not only is online content trackable, but the Internet provides for the perfect marriage of content and commerce: consumers are rarely more than a click away from what they might want to buy. If you see a celebrity wearing B&O headphones in your Facebook feed and you want to buy them, simply click a button.

Finally, there are immersive online environments that provide the perfect combination of product and entertainment. These are most common in advergames targeted at kids, websites that are created to engage rather than to sell outright (mostly because the target audience is too young to have a credit card), and they provide endless hours of entertainment.²⁰ Instances include sites like Barbie.com or Club Penguin, as well as the many food sites for kids such as Happymeal. com from McDonald’s or cereal brand Luckycharms.com, which has a note at the bottom of the page that says, “Hey kids, this is advertising,” a disclaimer that would be helpful if the site was targeted to kids of reading age, which it is not. Truly immersive experiences for kids exist in games like Neopets and Webkinz that encourage children to develop emotional attachments to virtual pets that “respond” with happiness when properly tended to, tending that usually requires buying either virtual or real products. The goal is to manipulate users’ emotions to inspire consumer behavior that ranges from paying subscription fees to engaging in micropurchases for upgrades and new game levels.²¹ While not specifically covert, I highlight these here because children under the age of eight cannot differentiate between advertising and editorial content, and because these websites are the type of advertising environments that Millennials grew up with: fun, engaging, online, and time consuming.

These examples show the significant and fundamental shift that is taking place: brands no longer merely place products in content; they actively create it. Put another way, the media environment we have today is populated by product placement in reverse: instead of putting products into content, content is inserted into advertising.

ADVERTISING: FROM MASS MARKETING TO SEGMENTED TARGETING

Advertising and marketing on a broad scale began in the 1950s with the advent of television. At that time, most people had access to a handful of national broadcast television networks plus a few local channels. Television programs targeted a broad audience, and advertisers spent the bulk of their budgets on these shows because there was really no other choice. The only competition in terms of getting a sales message in front of a large audience was radio, as well as perhaps newspapers and magazines, but these did not have the advantage of sight and sound, nor did they reach the millions of viewers that television provided.

In the nascent stage of television, producers and advertisers worked together to create television shows and then paid for an hour of time to air those programs on a network. These were shows like Texaco Star Theater or The Colgate Comedy Hour. The television and advertising industries were so intertwined, in fact, that the networks scheduled their programming based on when Detroit introduced their new cars: new car launches were in September, and so was the new fall television season. This was mass advertising through mass media.

By the early 1960s, networks created their own programming (or paid others to do so) and began to sell commercial space to advertisers, thus creating the advertising format we see today: television shows broken up with discrete commercial “pods” that include several commercials by different sponsors. This change was in response to the rising cost of television production, as well as to the game show scandals of the late 1950s. The most well-known of these cases involved a game show called Twenty One, where producers fed answers to more attractive contestants at the behest of their advertiser, Geritol. This became a notorious example of a trusted media source (TV) lying to its audience. We might even call it a fatal early misstep in content marketing. Even with these issues, sponsored programming like The Hallmark Hall of Fame continued, but it became the exception.

In terms of advertising messages themselves, starting as early as the 1920s marketers began to move beyond promoting products based on simple attributes (XYZ laundry detergent gets clothes cleaner because it has special ingredients, or ABC toothpaste gets your teeth whiter and brighter because it contains baking soda) to attaching a user benefit to the product (cleaner clothes will help you get a better job and whiter teeth will get you a husband or wife). Appealing to the psyche to sell products continues today, though the methods used have gone through several iterations over the decades. In the 1950s and into the 1960s, for example, there were two competing schools of thought about how best to get consumers to buy: the rational, or hard sell, versus the heart, or soft sell. The hard sell was based on differentiating products from their competitors by devising a Unique Selling Proposition (USP)—a simple phrase or tagline that would establish a brand as better than that of their competitors—a concept created by adman Rosser Reeves of the Ted Bates Agency. “M&Ms melt in your mouth, not in your hands” differentiated the candy as something that kids could eat without making a mess, and the line was used for decades. Key to this concept was to repeat the idea over and over and over until consumers could parrot the phrase back to the marketer, or more importantly, remember the sales message when they were standing in the aisle of their local store. USPs are still part of modern advertising, and we see this in taglines like “Expect More, Pay Less” for Target or “15 Minutes Could Save You 15 Percent or More on Car Insurance” for Geico. You might even be envisioning the little green gecko.

Alternatively, the soft sell, which was advocated by famous admen David Ogilvy and Chicago’s Leo Burnett, sold products through emotional appeals. David Ogilvy is famous for Dove (“1/4 cleansing cream”), “Schweppervescence,” and “The Man in the Hathaway Shirt,” among many others. Leo Burnett is well known for his use of characters, like the Marlboro Man, the Pillsbury Dough Boy, and Charlie the Tuna. Burnett understood that people connect with a person—even a fictitious one—more than they do with a string bean or a can of tuna fish, and that this connection would lead to product sales. We see this idea continue today in products like Virgin, which built their brand around CEO Richard Branson, a character if there ever was one! Online, where engaging with the customer is a personalized one-on-one experience, brands-as-people and people-as-brands have multiplied. Think here of Steven Jobs and Apple, or Progressive Insurance and Flo, or Lady Gaga, Justin Bieber, or Beyonce. The difference in the early days of TV, however, was that whether the method used involved USP or cartoonish spokespeople, the appeal was designed to attract everyone: young, old; male, female; rich and not-so-rich.

The late 1960s and early 1970s brought the Creative Revolution in advertising. Commercials and print ads became more sophisticated, more tongue-in-cheek in order to appeal to an increasingly educated baby boomer audience. Rather than banging consumers over the head with the repetitious messages of the USP or seeing the Marlboro Man on yet another prairie, consumers were presented with ads like “Lemon” for Volkswagen and “You Don’t Have to be Jewish to Love Levy’s” for Levy’s Rye Bread. At this time, psychologists became integrated into industry practices so that marketers could learn what emotional buttons to push in order to get us to buy. Focus groups, surveys, and personal interviews were used to ascertain the motivations behind consumer purchases. Today these methods have expanded to include ethnography, a technique whereby researchers trail consumers in their “natural habitat,” often following them with video cameras to record every nuance. Researchers for Nickelodeon, for example, will move into a child’s home for a few days and look in their closets to see what they actually buy and watch what media they interact with. Similarly, there are firms that specialize in marketing ethnography, such as ReD Associates, whose observers attend parties to learn consumers’ vodka drinking behaviors or spend a day with consumers on behalf of sneaker brand Adidas, trying to understand the obstacles that keep them from working out.²² This type of anthropological work is supported and expanded online through data analytics, which we will discuss later in the book.²³

Understanding what motivates consumers to buy is useless, however, unless advertisers can connect that learning to their product and unless that product provides a corresponding emotional benefit. This is where branding comes in. Branding, quite simply, is the use of a recognizable logo, a tagline (though not always), and a mythology.²⁴ A sneaker isn’t a running shoe; it is a Nike and the athletic excellence that embodies. Disney isn’t a theme park; it is magic. Coca-Cola isn’t a sugary carbonated beverage; it is happiness. For example, while in the past Coca-Cola would create a commercial and teach the world to sing in “perfect har-mon-y,” today they convey the same essence through the “Happiness Machine,” a video that shows college students being delighted and surprised by receiving not one but several bottles of Coke from a vending machine. As the video progresses, hands appear out of the machine to deliver first a bouquet of flowers, then balloon animals, and then a several-foot-long hero sandwich. One student even says about the vending machine, “I want to give it a hug,” and “Thank you, Coke.” Just like the earlier commercial, millions of people saw this video.

The connection of a commodity product to a story or an idea that will evoke emotion—“I want to give it a hug”—is what marketing is all about. These emotional connections become attached to a visual image that you immediately recognize—the swoosh, Cinderella’s castle, a red and white logo—and as soon as you see the symbol, it instantly conjures up memories of your interactions with these products. This is particularly important in a media environment that has become overwhelmed with competing product messages. Estimates are that we see upwards of 5,000 marketing messages per day.²⁵ We are not conscious of all of these, for sure, but the ones that do make it through the mental clutter are those that have the most emotional and psychological relevance. I may remember Banana Republic and Fage and Chipotle, but Abercrombie and Dannon and McDonald’s, not so much. You likely have a different experience. This is incredibly important for marketers because research has shown that as the media fragment and products proliferate, consumers reduce the number of brands they consider when buying a product. We are too busy to find something new, so we stay with what we know.²⁶

As marketers moved toward a psychological understanding of consumer purchase behavior, the introduction of cable television into American homes in the 1980s pushed marketing still further away from talking to a large homogeneous audience toward more divided and differentiated niches. Three broadcast networks morphed into dozens, and within a decade there were hundreds of television networks. Today the average American home has 189 channels to choose from, and each of us typically watches 17 different channels—more than five times what we watched in the 1980s.²⁷ Each of these cable networks appeals to discrete viewing tastes and lifestyles. There is MTV for teenagers and young adults, ESPN for men, and CNN for the news junky who was also likely a reader of Time or Newsweek. There are channels that appeal to women and ones that are devoted to kids. As time progressed and digital technology enabled cable systems to expand, there were channels not just for sports, but for single sports like tennis or golf, and even for individual sports teams like the Yankees and the Boston Red Sox.

These target audiences correspond to groups that advertisers are interested in reaching based on demographic characteristics (such as age, gender, income, education, and so on) or based on psychographics, which define people in terms of values, lifestyles, and personalities. For instance, a psychographic group called “Movers & Shakers” are adults between forty-five and sixty-four who shop at Nordstrom, play tennis, and drive a Land Rover while “Shotguns & Pickups” are adults between twenty-five and forty-four who order from Mary Kay, own their own horses, and drive a Dodge Ram Diesel.²⁸ Sorting the population in this way is known as segmentation, and it is used to fragment the marketplace into groups that will be most interested in a company’s product. Once an advertiser has identified the audience segments that will be interested in their products, they become “the target audience” for the brand. So iPads might appeal to moms who want to use the tablet to find new twenty-minute recipes or to read books to their kids or to find apps that will help juggle their busy schedules. These tablets are also popular with businesspeople who want a streamlined piece of technology, particularly when they are traveling. They might also be of interest to older adults who want to connect with their grandchildren via Skype or FaceTime, or even to use the tablet to play virtual games with them. Moms and businesspeople and grandparents are different market segments. As a group, they (and many others, in the case of iPads) make up the target audience. Once the target audience is determined, marketers pick the appropriate media to reach these groups with their message. So if Apple wants to reach moms, they might put commercials on Nickelodeon, Grey’s Anatomy, and A Baby Story, as well as print ads in Parents magazine and Good Housekeeping; if they want to reach grandparents, they might put ads on the evening news or in the local newspaper or sponsor a program on PBS. What we will see later is that because of digital tracking, connecting content to target audiences has become superfluous, meaning that advertisers have no motivation to support programming with substance, only content that attracts the target audience of interest.

Today, when it comes to target audiences, marketers are most interested in the cohort known as Millennials. This young adult group accounts for $1.3 trillion in annual spending, according to the Boston Consulting Group, and that figure will grow as this generation continues to mature and more fully enter the job force.²⁹ By 2015, there were more Millennials than baby boomers (83.1 million versus 75.4 million).³⁰ Millennials are also the primary users of online technologies, and they are the Influencers that marketers want to reach who will help promote their products both online and off.

THE DEMOGRAPHIC THAT STILL MATTERS: MILLENNIALS

Marketers talk about an age of post-demographic consumerism. According to marketing research firm Trendwatching, “people—of all ages and in all markets—are constructing their own identities more freely than ever. As a result, consumption patterns are no longer defined by ‘traditional’ demographic segments such as age, gender, location, income, family status and more.”³¹ To a certain extent that is true. Identities are more fluid. There are senior citizens interested in skateboarding, and in the UK there are more female than male video gamers, as well as more over forty-four than under eighteen. However, this idea misses the point. The Internet and its concomitant data will reduce—but not eliminate—the need to segment consumers in traditional ways. That is because while marketers need to get people to interact with them online, the way to get them there, for now, is mostly through traditional media. Because of this, marketers continue to categorize audiences by focusing on predictable life cycles. Those life stages—particularly the transition into adulthood—still and likely always will affect consumer purchases. Those transitioning now are part of a cohort known as Millennials.

Millennials—also known as Gen Y or Echo Boomers—are defined typically as those born between the early 1980s and the early 2000s.³² The Pew Research Center describes this generation as “relatively unattached to organized politics and religion, linked by social media, burdened by debt, distrustful of people, in no rush to marry—and optimistic about the future.”³³ They have been widely maligned as entitled, coddled, lazy, self-centered, and digitally addicted.

Societally, they have grown up in a time of instant gratification, abundance, and on-demand products. I have seen this in my own home. My daughter is a Millennial, and when she was young I got a video of H.R. Pufnstuf from the library. It was a TV show I loved as a child, and I wanted to share it with her. At the end of the program, one of the actors points at the viewer and says, “See you next week.” It was then my daughter asked me, “Why wait until next week?” I had to explain that unlike her ability to watch SpongeBob whenever she wanted to, if I wanted to watch my favorite TV show, I could only watch it once a week, and I had to be sitting in front of the television at the one and only single time during the week when it was on. She was horrified. The idea that she would not be able to watch what she wanted when she wanted was completely alien to her, as it is for others of her generation. On a personal level, Millennials grew up with helicopter parenting, being told they were special, and almost never hearing the word “no.”³⁴ Most importantly for advertisers, they are the “digital natives”—a generation that has grown up with digital technologies and who fluidly move between their online and offline lives.³⁵

Millennials are the largest generational cohort, accounting for just over 24 percent of the U.S. population.³⁶ In a wide-ranging research study, MTV found that their key concerns are getting a job, graduating college, and moving out of their parents’ house: really no different from previous generations in that regard. Where they differ, however, is that they are “later to launch”—that is, they tend to postpone adulthood (and marriage) for as long as possible.

No group this large, however, is homogeneous. To better understand their concerns, marketers break up this demographic into psychographic segments. Ypulse, a research company dedicated to understanding Millennials, created these five groups: Muted Millennials (live at home, risk-averse), Supremes (socially high achievers, most well educated of the groups, more than half are influenced by word of mouth), Moralistic Middle (old-fashioned values, thrill-shy), Alt Idealists (cause oriented, value individuality), and Beta Dogs (very passionate, networkers, most open to advertising, and driven by appearance).³⁷ Interesting to note that two of the five groups (Supremes and Beta Dogs) are open to marketing and particularly to word of mouth. These segments are the Influencers that drive brand adoption by others.

They are a generation dripping in brand culture. Not only do they interact with brands, they spend time talking about brands and recommending them (or not!) to their friends and followers both online and off.³⁸ Millennials, and in particular younger Millennials (ages eighteen to twenty-four), are more likely than boomers to say “people seek me for knowledge and brand opinion” (52 percent vs 35 percent), and to say that they are willing to share their brand preferences on social media (57 percent versus from 31 percent).³⁹ According to MTV, a whopping 81 percent recommend brands to people by word of mouth, while research from Intel found that 74 percent believe they influence the purchase decisions of their peers.⁴⁰ This makes sense, as this group is used to crowdsourcing information, so they value the opinion of many others when making decisions.⁴¹

Moreover, they do not only influence each other. If you are the parent of a Millennial or a Gen Zer (the generation after Y), you know what I mean. We are on Facebook, we text, and we might even learn Snapchat, if for no other reason than to be connected to our offspring in the way they feel most comfortable in relating.

MARKETING AND THE MILLENNIAL MINDSET

Given the changes in technology and Millennials’ propensity to interact with brands, marketers have changed how they interact with this group. While in the past, the goal was to know who the consumer was in order to craft a message that resonated with them, today the goal is to know who the consumer is so that you can get them to spend time with you. Consumer product companies want to be Millennials’ friends.

Marketing campaigns therefore play to making Millennials feel good about themselves. Doritos inspires Millennials to create advertising for the brand in hopes of having their commercial appear on the Super Bowl—recognition on a grand scale—and convinces them to “be bold” by participating in adventurous missions, like jumping from a thirty-foot platform or participating in a roller derby with pro racers, an act which might lead to tickets to SXSW to see Lady Gaga. Doritos psychographically describes this group as “Young and Hungry,” literally and figuratively, and their marketing reflects this attitude. In another example, Marlboro has an international campaign that uses the tagline “Don’t be a Maybe.” Their videos show young people having fun—driving in a car with their hair blowing in the breeze or jumping from a significant height onto an air-filled blob. Similar to Doritos, they play to the idea of living boldly. As they say in an internal promotional video:

As a brand Marlboro was not resonating with adult smokers even though its values of freedom, authenticity and master of destiny were. Smokers missed the essence of the cowboy which led us to our opportunity. Eliminate the word MAYBE from our smokers’ vocabulary to become the catalyst that inspires smokers from just thinking about life to taking the lead in life. To live the Marlboro values. To be True. Bold and forever forward.⁴²

The communication to Millennials, then, is that Marlboro smokers don’t sit back and watch; they take part in the action. But this is just an updated twist on the cowboy that represented freedom and individualism for past generations.

Another gimmick marketers have used with this group to considerable effect is asking young people if they can pick up and go away for a weekend—the ultimate expression of freedom. Anheuser-Busch asked Millennials if they were “up for whatever.” One thousand lucky Millennials who submitted an audition video on Facebook and who promoted the brand on Twitter with the hashtag #upforwhatever were put on a plane and sent to an unknown destination. Once on the ground, they found themselves amidst a three-day party including celebrities, games, and lots of Bud Light.⁴³ This campaign was so successful that Anheuser-Busch has run it multiple times.⁴⁴

Undergirding these youth-targeted campaigns is experiential marketing. It’s not enough for consumers to see an ad; they have to experience it, interact with it, be immersed in it much in the same way as they’re immersed in a videogame. This is why brands that never had a physical presence before are creating retail outlets. Of course, there’s the Apple Store, but there are now shops for M&Ms and Asics, and there was even a pop-up store for Pop-Tarts in New York City.

A Millennial campaign with broader appeal was Coca-Cola’s “Share a Coke,” which combined a number of elements that work for engaging this age group. The heart of the campaign was to print bottles of Coke, Diet Coke, and Coke Zero with labels that bore 250 of the most common first names, as well as a few group titles like Mom and BFF. If someone’s name was not available, they could request it at ShareaCoke.com for five dollars, or they could go to the site and send virtual versions of a personalized Coke bottle to friends. The availability of these specially marked bottles was promoted through in-store marketing, print ads, social media, experiential marketing, and a microsite, among other elements.

In one commercial for the campaign called “Share a Coke This Summer,”⁴⁵ a young woman wearing a necklace, “Jess,” goes into a store and buys a personalized Coke for herself as well as one for her friend Alisha, whom she meets on a rooftop where they drink their sodas. Appropriately for this generation, Alisha is African American, which taps into the group’s multiculturalism. Jess and Alisha go back and buy four Cokes—two more for themselves and two for friends (Alex and Maria). They go back again with still more friends to get sodas for a picnic at a park. In the final shots, hundreds of people are dancing and drinking Coca-Cola. Then, at nighttime, Jess goes back to the store where the clerk is closing down for the night. She hands the cashier a bottle that says “Chris,” and they walk away holding hands.

Integral to the campaign was the hashtag #ShareaCoke, which consumers were meant to use when they posted pictures of themselves with their personalized bottle of Coke. Close to 600,000 pictures were posted to Instagram alone.⁴⁶ Millennials were encouraged to share with the promise that their picture might be featured online or on a national billboard. This campaign was so successful that it reversed Coca-Cola’s ten year sales decline, a tough feat in light of concerns about obesity (and most particularly among teens).⁴⁷

What makes all this messaging so interesting is that it is the exact opposite of how advertising traditionally worked. Ads would tell you that you had ring around the collar, so you needed to use Wisk. Or that you had halitosis, so if you didn’t use Listerine, you would never get the guy or girl. Advertising was all about telling you what was wrong with you so that you would use the product. It was the very definition of problem-solution advertising. Now, it is all about entertaining you and telling you how great you can be so you will promote the product for them.

Moving from mass marketing to one-to-one interactions has changed how marketers communicate not only with Millennials, but with all of us. Unlike the thirty-second commercial that screamed at you to buy, Buy, BUY, these communications are subtle, friendly, and relationship-building. They don’t appear to be a prelude to a monetary transaction. Because they are personal, they are effective: it’s harder to say “no” to someone you have a connection with than to a nameless, faceless corporation.

These relationships are about getting us to share, as many women did with Dove’s “Sketch Artist.”⁴⁸ In this video, women describe themselves to a professional sketch artist who is behind a curtain and cannot see them. One after another, the women describe their flaws as they see them—their nose is too big, their lips are not full enough, their jaw protrudes, etc. Then, one by one, someone who has just met one of the women describes what they saw to the same sketch artist, and in case after case, they provide a gentler, more accepting description of the person they saw. The sketches are then placed side-by-side and shown to the woman depicted. The realization of how hard they are on themselves is sad and palpable. This video, like others we will look at throughout the book, manipulates our emotions to generate those strong feelings that move us to share content with others. “Sketch Artist” was viewed more than 65 million times. That’s more than the number of people who typically watch a prime time television show, or the advertising in it. And this video is three minutes long—six times the length of a typical TV commercial. That’s powerful marketing. But stop to think about it for just a minute and ask yourself: What does moisturizer have to do with feeling good about one’s self? And if you passed it along, why did you help Unilever (Dove’s parent company) promote their product?

There are any number of reasons why you might have shared the video, which we’ll talk about in the next chapter. For now, be aware that marketers will increasingly provide you with motivation to pass along their messages. Campaigns will be designed to include participation and personalization. Participation means that we produce the content, whether that’s creating an ad or voting for a favorite Starbucks holiday coffee with a hashtag (#VoteforJoy) so that we can get 50 percent off on the beverage. Technologies are allowing for increased personalization. For example, @AmericanExpress, which sponsored an “Unstaged” Pharrell Williams concert, sent tweets personalized and autographed to people who livestreamed the event.⁴⁹ Participation and personalization—combined with continuity, being continually in touch with consumers—are the tools marketers use to sustain long-term relationships, particularly with the ever-important Millennials whom they know are most likely to share, share, share.