Marketing to the Millennial Generation

In a past life, I worked for a college - trying to figure out how to use this new-fangled technology to market to and recruit among high school students. Teenagers. Millennials. Got pretty well-known for my work there, actually.

Well, someone remembered, and I just did an interview with the E-Commerce Times. Much of that discussion actually has implications for politics:

"The key thing to recognize when marketing to this generation is that it has seen more marketing, more advertising, more hype starting at a younger age and in a more pervasive way than any other generation," Kari Chisholm, president of Mandate Media in Portland, Ore., told the E-Commerce Times.

"As a result of that," he continued, "their BS detectors are very finely tuned. "When it comes to the Millennial Generation, they can sniff out hype and spin better than anyone else,"...

As I'm always telling our clients and friends, authenticity is critical.

If you can't hype this generation, what do you do? "You have to be authentic," Chisholm asserted. ...

"It all goes back to authenticity," he observed. "It's much more meaningful to a Millennial for a friend to say, 'Check out this song, this band, this clothing brand, this politician, this college,' [rather] than a commercial for those things."

Read the article.