Millennials Generation: Scratching The Digital Marketing Itch

From the Guardian:

Millennials generation: scratching the digital marketing itch

Scratch, a small creative team within Viacom, works to connect businesses to those born after 1980 through social media

The worlds of advertising in particular and media in general are currently fawning over the Millennials – those younger men and women born between 1980 and 2000 who, it is thought, have the greatest potential to live inside of the new digital culture.

For them, the smartphone and the Wi-Fi-connected laptop, Twitter feeds, Facebook pages, YouTube videos and all the other internet-inspired communication breakthroughs of the last decade or more are natural phenomena, simply part of the furniture of their lives. This is the generation that is always logged on and any brand considering its future wants to speak to the Millennials, to sell them products and to be involved in their daily lives.

One man, who is in the vanguard of this trend towards those who are replacing Generation X and the baby boomers as the next big thing, is Ross Martin, executive vice-president and head of a New York-based company Scratch, which is almost as hard to describe, as it is difficult to predict the digital future.

Scratch was born two years ago out of MTV, the music television channel that has moved far beyond "just music" with hits like Jersey Shore and Pimp my Ride, but Scratch's 50-strong staff is considered so important (and perhaps so different from the rest of MTV) that it reports directly Rich Eigendorff, the COO of Viacom Media Networks. Martin, who is a producer and programmer as well as holding an advanced degree in poetry, is quick to dismiss the notion that Scratch is Viacom's internal ad agency or a creative agency in any traditional sense.

He calls Scratch a "creative SWAT team" and a "cultural consultancy" that keeps tabs on everything from K-Pop smash hit phenomenon Gangnam Style to what Lady Gaga is up to. Of particular interest is how the Millennials are both interacting with and themselves creating the next cool cultural shifts. "It's difficult to anticipate where the zeitgeist is going and get there before culture does, but that's sort of what I have to try and do," says Martin. In Hong Kong he was speaking at Casbaa, the cable and satellite conference for Asia after a trip to Japan where he "hung out" in underground art bars and met sneaker designers, graffiti artists and photographers who, he says, are forming "visionary" communities both online and offline.

Martin doesn't believe it is possible to keep up with the Millennials but he does think that Viacom channels MTV, Nickelodeon and Comedy Central can "let them speak through our brands and our platforms". Viacom has a separate, global group of some 400 people called Be Viacom run by Dave Sibley that helps brands integrate their messages with Viacom products, increasingly both online and on the ground (through live events such as the MTV EMA awards) and on their TV channels.

The two groups sometimes work together and certainly Martin and Sibley speak at each other's events, but Scratch also provides a sort of socio-cultural consultancy to brands and companies, helping with things like product development and branding that will work better with how this younger generation thinks. Having worked with blue chip companies including Microsoft and HP as well the Guggenheim Museum. Scratch's biggest client at the moment is General Motors. Recently Scratch began running corporate recruiting on several university campuses in the US for GM because the company is interested in changing the DNA of its workforce.

Martin is spending increasing amounts of time outside of the US as part of Viacom's desire to globalise Scratch's particular brand of advice and work. Viacom already does tons of work on younger audiences and international expansion has been on the company agenda for decades. "Two of the biggest issues facing the Millennials are financial services and healthcare," says Martin. "These are both areas that are important not just in the US but globally."

On 15 November Viacom published new research on Millennials called The Next Normal which found that although this generation is really concerned about the flaccid economy and their own dim employment prospects, they largely describe themselves as "very happy". One of the biggest sources of that happiness is their embracing of social media and the internet in general. "One of the core traits of Millennials is hyper-collaboration," explains Martin, which is why social media is such an important part of understanding this next generation. "You can't check a box in social media and be done. It's a 24/7 job and it's really hard. It's alchemy of science, technology and creativity and a degree of magic. If you don't have them all you will fail."

He admits that media companies are "still in the Dark Ages" of tracking the data of how content is consumed across multiple platforms and devices and what that means in terms of monetisation but says media companies are a step ahead of the internet giants like Google and Facebook because media companies are more "cultural anthropologists". While he admits the industry has a lot to learn about data he believes that figuring out the emotional drivers to behaviour are the real keys to understanding and monetising this hyper-connected generation. "What we have to get is that storytelling is different on social than it is on TV and doing events on the ground is different from putting something on a mobile device and you can't afford to be mediocre at any of these things anymore," says Martin. "Our job is to be open to what this next generation needs and wants and be ready and able to amplify the compelling stuff they are creating."