Posted by bostjan, under zemanta on April 1st, 2010
Reaching generations who are never offline, ever multi-tasking is significantly different from advertising tactics old-media ecosystem developed. Us startups are constantly being asked to reinvent the wheel, because old-guys don’t change fast enough. So we asked friends over at konstrukt.it who work daily on first-class strategies for online marketing and branding challenges, to write a guest blog post on what has actually changed and what is this new ‘audience’ thing everybody is asking us (the tech-guys) about.
First of all let’s get one thing straight about the fastest growing segment of today’s active population. There is the Generation Y and there are the Millenials. They share a lot of common consumer behavior which makes both more or less one group for all the marketing research. However there are certain ideological differences that profoundly divide the generations born after ’81 and the generation born after ’94. Let’s call it historical recollection – one generation never ever even touched a Spectrum or Commodore, and the other one saw the fall of the Berlin wall whose consequent changes in political geographies coincide with the world of information opening through a new door (or should we say windows
. But for the argument’s sake lets’ use both segments that together comprise roughly 70 million people in US alone.
One thing is true, no matter how confusing the generational divides are, what we are facing here is a generation of multitaskers, who can juggle e-mail on their BlackBerrys while talking on cellphones while trolling online and really, and I mean really, don’t like to stay too long on any one assignment. The Y came of age just when internet started to fully open its flower and grew up with html fragments more or less running down their veins. Instinctively familiar not just with browsing the www but also with all the gadgets that accompanied the new age of digital information, Generation Y is the first trully 24/7 plugged-in generation.
Gen Y spends most of their time online. Minutes offline can seem pretty devastating even to non-geeks of this generation. They use the online landscape to build their worlds by nurturing contacts on social networks, by participating actively in the social media and keeping their inner information junkies happy by immersing themselves in data streams. Their biggest advantage is that they are absolutely native to the online habitat and are more than ready to take on new challenges that await the must-be-tech-savvy user in the future.
Due to all this Gen Y has a tendency to be information and text scanners. Reading a blog is just part of what they do while online and it is not improbable, that content will only catch their attention if it is rich enough. On the other hand of course this generation is able only to think in the language of rich content and as such it tends to produce more multimedia than any other generation beforehand. They crave their information inputs to be meaningful and present as many facets of particular problems in a glance as possible. They want the world to give them tools with which to work their way through the fields of knowledge and experience exchange, and desire a community with which to share their own.
They live to learn and share information and are afraid one one thing only: a dead end. Something that would cause their information stream to stop and reboot. Every piece of content they consume has to lead to the next one.
It is because generation Y wants this meaningful life and a solid learning curve backed with experience sharing and team participation, that they get along quite well with boomers ready to find their inner hippies again.
Bruce Tulgan, co-author of Managing Generation Y once said: “They’re like Generation X on steroids.” The high-performance and high-maintenance Generation Y is different. All researchers agree on that.
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