But at one time, when I worked at Rolling Stone, we were all incontrovertibly the next generation–and it provided the new magazine an interesting business challenge. The mainstream perception of the Sixties generation that spawned Rolling Stone was an anti-materialistic bunch bent on shunning consumerism and returning to nature. Advertisers were asking: did they want to reach this next generation?
The business staff launched a campaign in the advertising trade magazines called “Perception-Reality.” One page would show “perception”–a blissed-out longhair couple in beads and headbands, sitting cross-legged in front of a flower-painted VW minivan. The other page showed “reality”–a clean-cut husband and wife with beaming baby, dressed in Eddie Bauer beside a new compact car in front of a suburban tract home.
Of course, the ads were right: the Boomer generation, hippie roots notwithstanding, became the most rabid and insatiable consumers the planet has ever seen. It confirms what Sam’s song taught Humphrey Bogart about the future: the fundamental things still apply. Generational self-definitions are fine, but people grow up, get jobs, form families and, at least if they’re post-WWII Americans, start buying everything in sight.
So even though the next generation shows some consumer cynicism, it will pass (assuming no major catastrophes on the order of World War III or asteroid impact). In response to Naomi Klein’s impassioned tract “No Logos,” for example, a Japanese manufacturer has already introduced a highly successful line of goods without logos. And “American Idol” proves that even when the young audience is ushered right into the sausage factory of utterly synthetic pop culture, they’re still perfectly happy to buy Kelly’s CD.
But that, I told the consumer goods executives, doesn’t let them off the hook. One thing will change fundamentally with the next generation, and that is how it views and uses media. These are the first kids who have grown up never knowing a world without the Internet. For advertisers and news executives who want to reach this generation–soon to enter its teens–it’s crucial to understand this shift.
This media transition will be bigger than the impact of television on Boomers. TV really wasn’t a new medium–it was radio with pictures. The social context of broadcast had been established by radio decades earlier: the notion that millions of Americans sit in front of boxes in their living rooms, entertained by distant personalities funded by advertising. The additional visual impact of television vastly strengthened the medium’s power, but did not change its fundamentals.
A truly interactive medium such as the Internet, however, is another matter altogether and, as in the early days of radio, its real shape has yet to form. But there are a couple of early lessons one can draw about what the next generation is going to expect from media: first, the ability to customize all content, and second, built-in tools enabling the user to act on that content.
Customization is easy to understand: take newspaper classified advertising. It will be hard for the next generation to understand browsing large sheets of paper with tiny type for the precise automobile, job or apartment they seek: don’t you just type in what you want and the Internet brings back the exact items you’re looking for? Or music: why buy an entire CD for only a few songs you actually want to hear, when you can download exactly the tracks, in exactly the order, you’d like? And even the once-supreme gods of television programming are being brought to heel by TiVo technology. What’s this old-fashioned idea of “appointment television” when you can pick and choose when you’d like to see anything? Media of all types are going to get sliced and diced and rearranged, and any producer in denial about that will lose the audience.
The notion of tools is slightly more subtle, but basically means that once you learn about something in media, you want to be able to immediately take action. Find a car you want and submit a bid; read a movie review and order a ticket. This was a hard notion for old media to accept: in the early days, for example, there was debate at newspaper and magazine Web sites about putting links for purchasing books into book reviews; was this blurring the line between editorial and commerce? As it turns out, readers expect this tool, and are annoyed when it’s not available.
It’s the same in business. Earlier this year I spoke with a group of mortgage bankers who were still uncertain about how important online service would be for their business. Mortgages, they argued, are very serious transactions, and customers want to be able to talk to real people. My response was that certainly, there must always be an easy-to-reach human being behind any Web transaction–but that the bankers must keep in mind that there is a new generation coming along for whom it is a personal defeat when they have to dial the 800 number rather than completing their business online.
Reaching the next generation, in short, will continue to be a challenge and surprise as kids raised on the Internet begin to use it in every facet of their lives. Those of us in previous generations can only watch their behavior closely and do our best to invent Internet media that makes sense. Until, that is, those kids finally take over the controls and reshape the Internet into what it’s really supposed to be.
