16 thoughts on “A Generic Millenial Ad”

    • But you do see just about every one of these elements (except the gentle self-referential poking of fun) in ads that target millenials. This is a pretty good ad for a stock footage company.

      I was tempted to see if they had another one for my generation – but it would undoubtedly be rather depressing, as the majority of them are about various physical ailments…

  1. I can’t decide if my daughter will find this offensive or hilarious. I thought it was hilarious, so… she’ll probably just think it was dumb. Ah well. 🙂

  2. This is hilarious because it’s showing how “millennial” is just another meaningless grouping for marketing. Marketers want so hard for people to fit into neat little boxes. It’s actually really offensive, so it’s fun when people mock it in this way.

    Seriously, though, there’s a great video (by an actual millennial, though one on the older side like I am), called “Millennials Don’t Exist!” If you’re one of those people who complain about millennials or make gross generalizations about an entire generation of people, I’d strongly encourage you to watch it.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-HFwok9SlQQ

    • Poor Millennials. I rarely ever see them depicted as anything other than basket-case baby tyrants who are incompetent at life.

      That has to be grating, so I’m wondering if the silver lining is that the Millennials are now more primed to be cynical and skeptical about the media and marketing than previous generations. The opposite of Murray Gell-Man amnesia, where they consider if they’ve been depicted so outrageously, other groups’ reputations should be taken with a grain of salt, too.

      ETA — Just noticed you say you are a Millennial (so to speak), so now my post sounds like I’m talking about you while you’re in the room. Sorry! But your post does give me a bit of hope for my anti-Murray Gell-Man scenario.

      • The main point is that we’re just like everyone else, all the other people older and younger than us. We’re all just people. And older people are always complaining about younger people and have been doing so for … millennia. As the guy in that video I linked to very clearly explains. Seriously, please watch it. And note all the comments from millennials agreeing with him and noting how much they hate being stereotyped.

        I actually read an article recently describing what they called a micro-generation called Xennials, those people born from around 1978-1983, who alternately fit in the definition of Gen X or Millennial, depending on who you’re asking. That would be me and most of my same-generation family members. At first I thought the idea of a micro-generation was silly, but as I read the description, I found that I identified much more with how they described Xennials than either the (stereotypical) description of Gen X or Millennial. You can Google it if you’re interested. All these changes that are happening in the world, economically and technologically, are making smaller breakdowns of generations more important–if they’re to be relevant at all (which, of course, is certainly in question itself). I had a friend in high school who was a Millennial (by the 1980-2000) definition, as is her son, and yet they obviously had very different childhood and young-adult experiences and will have different cultural touch points. Which is part of what proves that the whole “generations” thing is a bunch of hooey, when you get right down to it. We’re all just people.

        • I agree; the “members of this generation are like X” meme strikes me as so much astrology as opposed to ye olde stereotyping. Particularly a tell if your “sign” isn’t mentioned in the traditional zodiac, as mine isn’t 🙂

          No argument that old folks have complained about Young People Today ever since talking was invented, but I have thought of the astrological dimension as a 20th century mass media phenomenon. Subject to subversion, like the parody in the video, so a it’s sci-fi fodder for me (what if the parody becomes a meme)?

          When I first heard about the mysterious Generation Xers they sounded like friendly “3rd Rock From the Sun” aliens: Odd, but harmless. Their press was largely neutral. But Boomers and Millennials? Negative press galore, and I toy with the idea that they’re filling the “someone to look down on niche” in popular culture.

          However, I’ve never seen any stereotype about “Xennials,” which is my age bracket. I assumed we slipped under the radar because we’re nameless. Well, until now apparently, although Slate once pitched “Generation Catalano.”

          I usually just identified other “Xennials” by cultural touch-stones from the 80s, especially cartoons: Voltron, Thundarr, by the power of Grayskull! Now that there’s a name, I’m going to Google around to see if my agemates are odd but harmless, or the scum of the earth, or odd scum of the earth 🙂

      • “Millennials are now more primed to be cynical and skeptical about the media and marketing than previous generations”

        I think this may well be true, but not because millennials get stereotyped by that marketing (this happens to everyone) but more because, having grown up with more types of media and electronic consumption, they have to learn to be cynical about it as a survival mechanism. You just expect to get spam emails trying to separate you from your money, so you set your email service so you don’t even see those emails. Meanwhile, there are old people who are not only reading them and taking them seriously but actually getting scammed out of money by them. Yeah, I do think that marketing is starting to work less predictably (and I don’t know if that’s only on young people or on pretty much everyone–I suspect the latter). That’s why it’s kind of hilarious to see marketers trying to combat this by putting people into ever smaller boxes and then trying to figure out what they want based on what boxes the marketers put them in. It’s ridiculous. I think that marketing itself (and especially commercials and that type of marketing) will undergo some massive reformation in the next few decades because of this. People are getting less gullible/persuadable/malleable, and I think that’s true for most adults and teens, not just millennials.

        • Exactly. Less gullible, more savvy, and a hastening of the demise of the kind of tactics parodied in the video.

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