A millennial’s advice to advertisers

Marketing to millennials is remarkably straightforward. State what you do, and then do it.

As a millennial, I grew up in an era where almost no organizations did this. The name of the game in the early 90’s was still overextended ad campaigns peddling sub standard products.

If you didn’t mind dropping millions of dollars, you could convince people that sugared cereal was an essential part of your morning, subpar beer made you attractive to the opposite sex, and kids needed an unbroken supply of new toys in order to be happy.

Millennials got the message, and as we age we became cynical when the promises didn’t come through. We’re distrustful of any organization of any kind, especially those that profit from us.

Out of that disillusionment has come some good things. We are highly resistant to traditional advertisements. There’s only two things that really works with us: integrity and transparency.

Both of those words have been redefined by my generation to mean:

Integrity = doing what you say you’ll do consistently

Transparency = doing what you say you’ll do without any “catches”

A few examples:

if you’re a non profit, you should be able to say “we want to see this specific outcome for these specific people. And here’s how we get our funding, and here’s where the money goes.”

If you’re a company, you should be able to tell customers “this is what we make, it’s really cool for this reason, and it will fix this problem for you for this price.”

If you’re a church, it needs to be something as simple as “we help the poor in this specific area and we take care of families that go to our church. And oh yeah, we have pretty good teaching on Sunday morning with a good worship team.”

Where things fall apart for millennials is when inconsistencies show up.

That could look like being part of a church that we believe has a stated goal of helping the community around us financially, and realizing that 99% of the budget goes to pay for the cost of the church building and the pastor. Or when Kellogg’s tells us that frosted flakes has nine essential vitamins and minerals, but none of them are absorbable for the human body. Or social media networks that claims to build communities, structures itself in a way to maximize ad dollars instead, separating people into smaller and smaller communities of toxic echo chambers.

These things are inconsistent because it goes against what we thought the goals were.

Great examples of groups getting it right are all over the place, but one of my favorites is Valhalla DSP. They’ve never run a sale, ever. It’s really simple how they structure the business – you pay $50, and you get this really cool plug-in that you can use if you’re a musician that does all kinds of cool stuff. No strings attached, no upgrade and update costs. They are really, really clear about what they do, what they offer, and what you get if you spend $50.

Wikipedia is a another great example. The transaction is simple – you can access the whole site for free if you want, or if you’re a generous person, you can donate a couple of dollars so that they can stay in business. Wikipedia could make tens of millions of dollars by sharing the information that users are clicking on, or by placing ads on their site. They don’t, because that’s not what Wikipedia is about.

Good news is, it’s not too late. Organizations can pivot. Facebook could say “what is going to make us profitable long term is building a healthy community. We’re going to figure out ways to profit from a healthy community, and rely less on data as our only source of income”. General Mills could say “we’re a leader in the food industry, and we plan on being around 50 years from now. Which means we need to drastically change our farming practices so we can position ourselves to be leaders in sustainable farming in 10 years. And oh yeah, figure out how to change our products to make them benefit the long term health of our consumers. Maybe even push up the prices in the process and make an even bigger profit.”

Millennials aren’t asking for corporations to stop turning profits. We are just sick of corporations and organizations making exorbitant short term profits by sacrificing their integrity and transparency.

If you’re launching a product, start from the ground up by really being specific about what you give consumers, how are you give it to them, and what they can expect. If you’re part of a legacy brand, if you want to survive in the future, there has to be a narrowing and a redefining of what you do.

It’s a simplest thing in the world, and it’s also the most difficult because it requires making a lot of hard emotional decisions.

One last thing – if you’re an organization like Kelloggs, and you don’t wanna change fundamentally what you do, it’s better to be honest about what you do than keep up the ruse. Maybe rebrand to something like “lucky charms – a super fun, 90’s throwback breakfast for when you feel like celebrating.” At the very least, we’ll appreciate the honesty. And maybe even buy it, because those 90s commercials were pretty entertaining. ❤️