I’m going to ask?that EVERYONE post an advertisement that either ?targets young consumers via social medial/viral/influencer marketing AND/OR? an ad that engages with a con

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published online 31 July 2013Television New Media Michael Serazio

Bias of a Consumer Generation Selling (Digital) Millennials: The Social Construction and Technological

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Article

Selling (Digital) Millennials: The Social Construction and Technological Bias of a Consumer Generation

Michael Serazio1

Abstract This article investigates marketers’ new media strategies targeting the millennial generation. Drawing upon in-depth interviews with industry professionals and an assortment of business discourses, I find that this consumer demographic is routinely conceptualized as “digital natives” who exhibit a “networked hypersociality” and a “participatory exhibitionism.” A variety of innovative promotional tactics are being used to solicit self-expression and cultivate community within branded spaces and flows online. This development could reshape the advertising industry as commercialization further blurs with social and cultural content, obfuscating branding’s persuasive purpose from audiences. It also raises concerns about commercialization hijacking the political potential of an often-cited “empowering” new media environment as well as diminishing opportunity for youth identity to exist autonomous from the consumer marketplace at a time of escalating personal debt.

Keywords youth, marketing, new media, social media, millennials, digital natives

“You can no longer talk about youth movements and technology movements as though they’re separate things.”

––Youth marketing webinar panelist

Young people have not simply adopted the Internet, they have internalized it.”

––Montgomery 2007, 8, italics in original

1Fairfield University, CT, USA

Corresponding Author: Michael Serazio, Fairfield University, 1073 N. Benson Road, Fairfield, CT 06824-5195, USA. Email: [email protected]

491015TVNXXX10.1177/1527476413491015<italic>Television & New Media</italic>Serazio research-article2013

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Among demographic concepts, the “generation” remains precariously situated: a product of subjective, collective memory as much as empirical, identifiable history. This article investigates how the advertising and media industries are conceptualizing and strategizing the “millennial” generation (also popularly known as “Generation Y,” those U.S. teens and young adults born in the 1980s and 1990s) through a perceived technological intimacy. The research illuminates how millennials are “sold” in a dou- ble sense: both the online promotional tactics used to target a cohort so often decried as unreachable through traditional channels as well as the stereotypes spun about this generation’s values and behaviors that, cyclically, legitimate the commercial work that is produced for them. I argue that marketers put forth a narrative about “digital natives” that recalls Gumpert and Cathcart’s (1985) theory that the worldviews and relationships of every generation are influenced by the media ecology of their youth years.

From this “common sense” perspective emerging about millennials—that is, of a demographic “hyperconnected” and “empower[ed]” through technology—a variety of corporate strategies are emerging (Goodstein 2007, 177, 178). These strategies attempt to address the developmental needs long native to adolescents (i.e., identity, commu- nity, etc.) with the latest opportunities provided by user-generated content, online social networks, and spreadable media. By designing branded online spaces and flows for expression and interaction—and effectively monetizing the social Web—the mental- ity and output of the advertising industry is being transformed. This points to a more flexible, collaborative media ecosystem than that of twentieth century mass broadcasting— an environment touted by marketers as more “democratic,” yet, at the same time, one that erodes clear borders between commerce and sociocultural life and obscures the conspicuousness of the ad message from the audiences it courts (Serazio 2013).

While marketers accumulate abundant information on Generation Y’s connection to digital technologies, scholarly research on those efforts remains lacking; this proj- ect represents an exploratory effort to begin to fill that gap (Montgomery 2007, 26). Given that millennials retain an estimated $200 billion in annual spending power (and $10 trillion over their lifetime), their interest to advertisers can hardly be overstated (Yarrow and O’Donnell 2009, xvii). An inquiry into how these commercial interests construct and address this consumer generation through new media thus arrives at a timely moment—particularly given the increasingly unsustainable amounts of per- sonal debt that young people are amassing (Draut 2007). Moreover, this article raises concerns about the political potential of empowering technologies being hijacked for mere profit-making ends and whether youth identity and communities will be limited to consumerist avenues in that developing digital space.

Literature Review

Generational Sociology

Some contend that the entirety of American history can be divvied up into successive generational cycles (Strauss and Howe 1991). Edmunds and Turner (2002, 7) define a

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generation as “an age cohort that comes to have social significance by virtue of consti- tuting itself as cultural identity”; similarly, Bourdieu (1993) argues that generations are more socially than biologically constructed. According to Mannheim (1952), this social solidarity and collective consciousness derives from experiencing historical events from a common chronological vantage point. Today, however, thanks to the fragmentation of “mass society” into niche market segments, advertising and media seem increasingly responsible for cohort-wide coherence (Edmunds and Turner 2002, 4). Alanen (2001) usefully develops the social constructionist view of “generationing” as a way to appreciate how the very act of identifying generations is a fluid, negotiated process. This project thus seeks to understand how millennials are “generationed” by commercial interests through a prism of technological bias. Moreover, it explores how that purported “peer personality”—a cohort’s “caricature of its prototypical member”— contributes to advertisers exploiting new media formats and opportunities for brand intimacy (Strauss and Howe 1991, 63). Whereas earlier American generations may have forged their connections and identities through trauma and political upheaval— perhaps producing a more durable self-consciousness from World War II or the 1960s unrest—commercial interests may well circumscribe millennials in the online worlds they inhabit, limiting any collective sense of self to the consumer marketplace.

Youth Culture, Youth Markets

Although youth marketing traces a long history, less scholarly attention has focused upon its growth (Schor 2004). Osgerby (2004, 20) notes that youth emerged as com- mercially central in the postwar years when a demographic baby boom promised lucrative opportunities as teenage culture was targeted by those eager to cater to “what they saw as a new breed of affluent, young consumer[s].” Just as in the 1950s, market- ers today still tend to use the most privileged youth as the representatives of their entire generation, ignoring the reality (and dismissing the utility) of those less well off.

This again points to the need to treat generational myths as precisely that; for as Hollander and Germain (1992, 3) contend, segment creation (of youth, for example) is “an active effort to foster in consumers . . . an image of what they ought to be.” Similarly, as Buckingham (2006, 8) notes, “These categories [e.g., generation] . . . are very quickly taken up by [marketers] as a means of describing and hoping to control what they perceive as a volatile and unpredictable market.” From the 1950s until today, countless agencies—several representatives of which were interviewed for this project—have sprung up to assist with that project of power: summoning into being the consumer subject’s sense of self so as to activate commercial activity from him or her.

These efforts have ranged from George Gilbert’s Youth Research Company pio- neering the use of teens to poll friends on spending habits in the 1950s through to MTV and Nickelodeon using ethnographic approaches in the 1980s and 1990s— thumbing through suburban closets and tagging along for mall visits (Montgomery 2007; Osgerby 2004). The commercial discourse surrounding “Generation X,” the cohort preceding millennials, reflected a more pessimistic tone, with that demographic

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seen as elusive and cynical (Noble et al. 2009, 626). However, in the past two decades, increasing birthrates coupled with (prerecession) roaring economies revived hype around youth consumers and cued opportunistic commercial scheming. Yet, despite the fact that this “Digital Generation has become the most heavily researched demo- graphic in the history of marketing,” proclamations of panic abound from media and advertising leaders about their manageability (Montgomery 2007, 13). Rupert Murdoch, CEO of News Corporation, offered an emblematic summation of the logic involved in trying to win them over: “We may never become true digital natives but we can and must begin to assimilate to their culture and way of thinking” (Watkins 2009, ix).

These aspirations might usefully be contextualized within wider strands of an ongoing consumer culture debate—for they suggest just how outdated the “mass cul- ture” laments of old are when it comes to commercial engagement (Horkheimer and Adorno 1977). Engagement, after all, is a term that, in and of itself, suggests a more “participatory culture” era as compared with conceptualizations of the consumer as a mindless and passive receptacle. Those who celebrate the democratic, creative proper- ties of new media are not wrong in diagnosing that optimism (Bruns 2008; Jenkins 2006; Shirky 2008). Yet, as this research shows, scholars might also take note of the ways that marketers are aligning themselves with that premise and co-opting that participation.

Digital Natives

Gumpert and Cathcart (1985, 23) propose, “Different world perspectives and human relationships are as much a matter of media gaps as they are generation gaps.” In other words, each generation is supposedly equipped with certain media grammars and lit- eracies in its youth; these are influenced by that era’s media ecology and reflected in the values and habits—and ways of thinking, more broadly—of a given cohort. They contrast, for example, those born in the 1920s and 1930s—“who have learned to pro- cess reality in terms of a logically ordered, continuous and linear world produced by primarily a print orientation”—versus those “whose electronic orientation is to visual/ auditory, discontinuous reality” (Gumpert and Cathcart 1985, 24, italics added). Similarly, they suggest, those millennials born into the digital world will inherently grasp that logic and behave accordingly. Gumpert and Cathcart liken this to the bias of language an individual first acquires as the sustaining lens through which she interacts with the social world: “Those born into the age of radio perceive the world differently than those born into the age of television” (Gumpert and Cathcart 1985, 29). It is not my intention here to litigate for or against such technological determinism; rather, I will show how marketers subscribe to such a thesis in characterizing their millennial targets as digital natives (the inherently empowered human “products” of an interac- tive media environment).

Such “cyberkid” mythology—wherein youth is “the epicenter of the information revolution, ground zero of the digital world”—can be traced back to 1990s Web cover- age in techno-utopian venues like Wired (Katz 1996). Rushkoff (2006, 2) furnishes an

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early version of this basic narrative: “Kids are natives in a highly mediated culture where adults are still immigrants.” Prensky (2001) also advances the digital natives thesis, arguing that technological change is remapping the very circuitry of how mil- lennials think: that they now require rapid interactivity and graphical interface, abhor top-down exposition in favor of inductive discovery, and are equipped to multitask in a nonlinear, networked fashion. Yet, perhaps the most influential figure in populariz- ing the notion of a generation of young people growing up digital—that is, fast-mov- ing, empowered, and collaborative—has been Tapscott (2008), who argues for a series of behavioral contrasts differentiating baby boomers (the “products” of network TV) from their uniquely tech-savvy children (the “products” of the Internet).

Buckingham’s (2008b) edited volume examines the implications for character for- mation, socialization, and politics as young people come of age with digital technolo- gies woven into the fabric of everyday life and how “prosumer”-driven, bottom–up media are affecting their relationships. Stern’s (2008) contribution to this collection— exploring how user-generated content offers youth a valuable platform for self-real- ization at an uncertain moment of life-transition—is a lesson I find that advertisers are keen to capitalize upon in their Web 2.0 designs. We ought to question the conse- quences of identity being channeled through digital branding schemes at such a critical developmental stage: If the nascent self is based upon mere marketed meanings, what happens when a young person can no longer “afford” them? Herring (2008, 74, 75), deconstructing the rhetoric about online youth, notes how “self-reliant and ‘in charge’” they are cast by media producers—a theme echoed by the marketers I interviewed who similarly “exoticize [the digital native] . . . emphasizing its novelty, radical difference from what came before, and transformative potential.”

In the commercial discourse examined here, technology is, indeed, regarded as a liberating force for youth, though, as will be shown, it is liberation from an old regime of marketer power (that saw subjects more passively) and into a new, more interactive (read: “democratic”) version wherein youth have the “means . . . to reach past the constraining influence of their elders to create new autonomous forms of communica- tion and community”—within a branded space, of course (Buckingham 2008a, 13). The fact that marketers draw upon the language of “liberation” and “democracy” sug- gests that the political potential of digital technologies might be usurped for mere consumerist ends.

Other recent scholarship on the emergence of digital natives has taken more of an ethnographic, functionalist approach to millennials’ socialization, play, and learning (Ito 2010; Mesch and Talmud 2010); that youth might derive pleasure from the “opportunities to publicize and distribute their work to online audiences and to gain new forms of visibility and reputation” now enters into marketer plans when courting this demographic (Ito 2008, 1). Part of the challenge, however, for contemporary advertisers is to figure out how to navigate these “networked publics,” as boyd (2008) calls them, in ways different from the broadcast and outdoor promotional spaces afforded throughout the twentieth century. Moreover, as online profiles become the cornerstone of identity, digital natives appear increasingly lax about giving away per- sonal data online and how it might be used by commercial interests (Turow 2006):

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The digital age has brought about new incentive to reveal information about yourself . . . At no time in human history has information about a young person . . . been more freely and publically accessible to so many others. (Palfrey and Gasser 2010, 54)

Some social critics charge that youth are being debased by all these technological changes (Bauerlein 2008). Whether empirically true or simply “generationing,” this work is meant to show the ways in which these narratives circulate in the advertising industry, what impact they might have on the digital campaigns being developed there and in the media industries more broadly, and how this may, in turn, affect the politi- cal, social, and cultural potential of millennials.

Method

As a study of the industrial construction of audiences (namely, “digital” millennials), this paper contributes to a tradition of media studies scholarship on cultural production (Hesmondhalgh 2007; Peterson and Anand 2004). It is an effort, not unlike Sender’s (2004) work on the gay market or Davila’s (2001) work on the Hispanic market, to draw out the thinking that circulates about millennials and how those digital native stereotypes inform the campaigns staged—an effort to see this cohort through the eyes of those tasked with “selling” them, as a concept and in practice.

Advertising scholarship has less rarely gone behind-the-scenes like this—more often offering insightful readings of the final product (Williamson 1978), while failing to account for the assumptions of the producer of that commercial content. This has resulted in a tendency to focus on the advertising text itself rather than the “authors” of it, which I rectify here by shining the spotlight on the digital marketing creators of youth com- mercial culture (Soar 2000, 419). Much like Deuze (2007), I’ve sought to chart the “media logic” about millennials: This refers to the ways that cultural producers create their work in light of changing expectations about the roles of audiences. In keeping with the critical media industry studies research agenda that Havens, Lotz, and Tinic (2009, 273) propose, I examine “how knowledge about texts, audiences, and the industry form, circulate, and change; and how they influence textual and industrial practices.”

The research has been exploratory, qualitative, and inductive—a first step toward opening a new front (advertisers’ expectations and strategies) in an ongoing scholarly conversation about the relationship between millennials and technology. I attempted to contact, by e-mail, thirty-two individuals or companies that specialize in this par- ticular consumer segment in the United States as identified in journalistic coverage or industry prominence. These contacts included agency CEOs, digital and integrated strategy directors, and research department heads involved with institutions as diverse as advertising shops and consulting firms; broadcasting networks, film studios, and music labels; social media and software companies; and apparel, automotive, and bev- erage brands—in short, any professional or employer with a vested stake in the millen- nial market who might be willing to speak with me. From this open inquiry, I secured largely one-on-one, semistructured, in-depth interviews with fifteen (anonymized) participants during phone calls that lasted, on average, forty minutes each; these

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interviewees ranged from long-term veterans of youth marketing to millennials them- selves hired for their “native” insights.

Complementing this, I drew upon an assortment of business reports, company web- sites, webinars, books, and dozens of magazine and newspaper articles in the popular and trade press oriented to this nexus of millennials, marketing, and new media. (This included all relevant coverage in Advertising Age in 2010 and 2011, which I read and annotate weekly for stories relating to this subject.) More broadly, I was informed by research conducted for a book-length project on nontraditional advertising that included hundreds more articles and dozens more interviews (Serazio 2013). These textual mate- rials helped me understand that common sense emerging in the marketing industry about youth and young adults today. The central research questions included, “How are advertisers conceptualizing millennials as digital natives?” “How are those construc- tions playing into new media strategies and tactics?” “And how might this inform the outlook of the marketing industry toward a more flexible and collaborative output?”

Analysis

The Selling of the Digital Millennial Millennials are inherently aligned with technology. Intimacy with the digital world is one of the greatest strengths of their generation. Never having known a world without digital technology, Millennials are the first “digital natives” and experience the world in a completely different way than previous generations. They recognize the power and importance of social networks and utilize the Internet as a trusted source and a platform for self-expression. In the eyes of the Millennials, personal online networks hold as much importance and authority as any conventional media channel. (Marketing to Millennials 2010)

The above passage, drawn from a report titled, “Millennials: Marketing to a Different Mindset,” embodies much of the narrative circulating about young people today—chiefly, that this consumer demographic has been “rewired” in accordance with new media technologies. Examples like this abound: An “Unmasking Millennials” global webinar claimed that the single biggest factor that defines this generation and marks them as different from predecessor cohorts is their technological savviness. Influential market research studies have included a report announcing the arrival of “Digital Kids” (Schor 2004, 102) and another report that dubs millennials the “Technology Everywhere Generation,” because they “have innate ability to use tech- nology, are comfortable multitasking while using a diverse range of digital media, and literally demand interactivity as they construct knowledge” (Bauerlein 2008, 73, 82). One president of a brand consulting firm explicitly echoes Gumpert and Cathcart’s (1985) generational theory in a post on her “Millennial Marketing” blog:

Above all . . . Gen Y is unique . . . The thing that makes them unique, perhaps in all history, is access to platforms to broadly communicate and share their ideas. This ability alone may make the gap between Gen Y and earlier generations more striking than any previous gap, or possibly any to come . . . “The digital revolution has not only given this generation of young

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people access to knowledge and information on an unprecedented scale, but it has also given them massive influence.” Mobilizing that influence requires making it easy to access and share information with peers. Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, topic-specific blogs, and opinion sites like Yelp are all ways to encourage Millennials to talk to each other about your brand. (italics in original)

Note the language of political liberation here and note, too, how it’s framed less for its democratic potential and more for commercial exploitation. Just as this consultant maintains that the Internet represents the most important “shaper” of the millennial mind-set, another trade report fittingly heralds a new consumer altogether: “Consumer 2.0.” Others carry forward the evolutionary metaphor: “Technology . . . is reshaping the marketplace because it is reshaping consumers from the inside out,” writes Johnson (2006, 5, italics added) in a book on Generation Y marketing. Likewise, a report titled, “The Truth About Youth,” unknowingly evokes McLuhan’s (1994) “media as extensions” notion:

Technology, of course, is the great global unifier; it is the glue that binds this generation together . . . Compared in the past to an extra limb for young people, we believe technology has become even more fundamental . . . We all know how important technology is to young people, but a willingness to sacrifice one of their human senses to keep it shows just how intrinsic it has become . . . For young people, technology is more than a useful tool or an enabler. It truly is their fifth sense . . . Technology enables young people to sense the world and make sense of the world.

A cable network’s report on youth happiness invokes this even more simply, quoting a 20-year-old emblematically: “I exist through m

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