• by P.J. Bednarski , Staff Writer, February 10, 2015

On "The Dick Van Dyke Show", Rob Petrie could grab Laura and go through the swinging kitchen door where, in full voice, they could discuss the completely nutty thing Buddy just said in the living room. And Buddy wouldn’t hear a word of it, as if one room away was in a different time zone.

But we understood. That was TV, and those were the '60s, and to swipe a line from the great former Washington Post TV critic Tom Shales, nobody ever turned off the television set at the end of the evening and said, “Well, that was real.”

Decades of feminist literature has now imprinted in our brains that television commercials for everything from toothpaste to floor polish to canned soup treated women as domestic idiots, easily duped. Also, completely and utterly false.

At the Interactive Advertising Bureau’s Leadership Meeting in Phoenix on Monday, Erin McPherson, Maker Studio’s chief content officer, suggested those days of hard sells and dubious value propositions are over.

According to an account at Adweek.com,  the millennial generation won’t play that game. "This generation doesn't dislike brands," she said. “What they don't like is advertising." 

They want authenticity. It's like Larry Wilmore says. They're keepin' it 100.

That’s why McPherson said marketers are increasingly turning to native advertising, and by forging a bond of like-mindedness, are building loyalty and sales. “These online video creatives pay special attention to their audiences and refuse to do anything that would ruin those relationships, their native content resonates.”

On one hand, I dislike the idea that my generation and all other generations really, really liked advertising in all of its Madge the Manicurist splendor.  

But on the other hand, a lot of what McPherson is getting to makes sense. Online advertising, specifically targeted and at this point, still aimed at a broad market being served almost individually, has it all over mass messages told on mass media. It’s personal and real.

McPherson’s observations aren’t new at all, and I don’t think she’s claiming they are. Bob Garfield, curmudgeon, MediaPost columnist and public radio host, summed up the concept in "Can't Buy Me Like: How Authentic Customer Connections Drive Superior Results," the book he wrote with Doug Levy in 2013.

“What you should be doing is fostering and cultivating actual conversations, shared experiences and relationships, actual flesh and blood, human relationships with the people who used to just be account numbers to you," Garfield said in an NPR interview back them. “And in a digital world, that is not only possible, it's now more or less mandatory.”

Plainly put, if Snickers can have 11 million “likes” on Facebook, and Ikea can have 4 million, it’s proof that there’s a generation of consumers that didn’t need the Supreme Court to tell them that corporations are people.

It seems to me, the structure of online video and the move to consume it in smaller pieces on the run serves to consolidate content with advertising. Consumers have gone from the proposition that once said, “If you want to be entertained, you agree to be advertised to every 15 minutes” to a more agreeable proposal that says, “We know all about you so we’ll give you content with an attitude you like, and you’ll remember that you like us.”

Maker Studios, probably more than most, walks that walk. Adweek says McPherson claims Maker Studios is now the largest distributor of short-form video content in the world, with 11 billion monthly views, though mostly overseas and many of them not old enough to drive, vote or drink.

What they are old enough to do is discern the real deal and become accustomed to seeing content that is real (as in mistake-prone, self-conscious YouTube videos) and advertising that repeats that vibe. It’s authentic, probably above all else. And millennials like that.