• by Jack Feuer , July 11, 2007

We need to clone Mark-Hans Richer.

The Pontiac marketing whiz moved to Harley-Davidson this week to help the biker company attract what Joe Pesci's character in "My Cousin Vinny" would call "utes." Richer, who created the remarkable "Oprah" car giveaway gambit for the G6 and too many other terrific media innovations to mention here, is one of the very few high-profile pros who truly gets the 18- to-34-year-old consumer.

Here's what Mark-Hans knows that his peers honor mostly in the breach: Young Americans are not just versions of us with dirtier mouths, digital devices, less nose hair and ADD. They are an entirely new species of human.

I found out the hard way this month, when the son and his girlfriend, on an adventure in Europe, stayed at a Paris hotel situated in a neighborhood that looked like the South Bronx. Then they had a close encounter with a threatening junkie in the Red Light district in Amsterdam that fortunately resulted in no injuries and the loss of only 20 euros.

When the former wife and I drilled deeper into the itinerary chosen by the travel agent--a personal friend of the girlfriend's father, who fancies himself a 21st-century version of a free-spirited buccaneer--we discovered every single place the travel agent had booked our kids was in a neighborhood a Crip wouldn't be comfortable walking around in.

The free spirit had encouraged our kids to do Europe like we did it in the '70s and '80s, unencumbered by Muggle concerns, such as safe hotels or even train reservations. (Full disclosure: I endorsed this madness, lest I jeopardize my old-hippie cred.) So the ex and I had to rebook the rest of the month-long trip ourselves, at terrifyingly increased cost, which is probably why we haven't heard from the buccaneer in a week.

Yes, I made sure the kid had a global cell phone. And an adapter for the Nano. But beyond that, we didn't account for how differently the little darlings would think about an experience as timeless (to the 'rents) as the summer-trip-to-Europe life passage. It never occurred to us that the kids wouldn't find cheap hotels, seedy 'hoods and lack of Internet access irresistibly exotic.

Richer would never make those mistakes.

He knows this demo too well. And we're not just talking about the target du jour here. This is the first digital-culture generation, and their media habits and brand behavior are going to figure prominently in every marketing plan for the next couple of decades. Which is why if you can't clone Mark-Hans, you'd be well-served to copy him. As for the young lovers, fear not. They are now cooing in Verona, in a hotel we found online.

All's well that ends well, man.