Daily Archives: May 14, 2009

Marketing to Millennials.

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According to Harvard’s Dr. Urs Glasser, “By age 20, kids will have spent 20,000 hours online – the same amount of time a professional piano player would have spent practicing.” Were one to calculate all the television children of the 80s and 90s watched, I’m sure we’d see a comparable number. That said, TV is one-way (inbound) and online is two-way (read-write) and therefore a little healthier.

 

Regular readers know I have dumbed-down Forrester Research’s Technographic segmentation study into two simple groups “Posters” and “Pasters.” According to Forrester and a couple of other sources only 8% of social media users are “posters,” or original content creators.  But, according to the Book “Born Digital” written by John Palfrey and Dr. Glaser, 35% of millennial girls and 20% of boys in the U.S. are blogging, meaning these so-called “digital natives” index very high as Posters. As such, they need to be treated differently. 

 

While writing my anthropology thesis in college, I sent out letters to leading professors around the country asking for input. It took months and lots of effort on everyone’s part to gather, process and exchange all the info. Today, using email, the net, and links, I could have done this work in a day. (Digital Natives get this in ways others don’t.)

 

As a brand and communications planner, understanding this culture and how Millennials buy and are sold is going to be quite a fun ride. Peace!