Around the Net
Marketers Must Infiltrate Gen Y's Impenetrable Sphere of Influence
- NY Times, Monday, January 23, 2006 10:15 AM
The New York Times has an interesting article in which it follows around Gen Y consumers, monitoring their media habits. It finds that as millenials, or those born between 1980 and 2000 are often called, move their way toward becoming the dominant consumer group (as they should be by 2010), marketers are struggling to keep up. The number of vehicles millenials use to find information and entertainment is astounding, making them a "moving target" and digital media a tough field for marketers to master. And while advertisers and media and technology companies have begun finding new ways to reach this group, the vast digital social networks under which millenials operate have broad-reaching and hard-to-gauge ramifications. One analyst says the "democratization of social interaction" fundamentally changes this generation's relationship with everything, making it harder than ever to penetrate the sphere of social influence. What's more, word travels fast, so what's hot and what's not changes every single day. This is another reason millenials feel the need to be online all the time. As one teen says, being disconnected for a whole day is almost the same thing as saying “you don’t exist.”
