SlideShare une entreprise Scribd logo
1  sur  184
Télécharger pour lire hors ligne
3
STATES
A M E R I C A N
M I L L E N N I A L
OF THE
OGILVY RED
THINK SERIES
OCT 2015
4
5
NOSUCH
THING
ASA
MILLENNIAL
THERE IS
6
The supposed teen-to-early-thirtysomething
generation is nothing more than a convenient
idea, a series of uninteresting generalizations
existing solely in the heads of media pundits and
marketers. There is no shortage of self-anointed
experts on the topic (including a fellow who’s
titled himself ‘Mr. Millennial’), who pen speeches
about Millennials’ purported affections for
smart watches, mobile payments, world travel,
connectivity, health and fitness, and being ‘always-
on.’ Such experts are, unfortunately, missing the
point. And what a pity, because the realities of
this American cohort’s experiences run the gamut
of scintillating to stagnating, awe-inspiring to
heartbreaking.
7
America is now changing too
quickly for people with a twenty
year age difference to possess
a common history. A 33 year
old Millennial remembers what
it was like to first get dial-up in-
ternet access; a 13 year old has
never been without Facebook.
One generation, many realities:
A whole world of change occurring
between some influential headsets.
8
Millennials are actually a series of subgroups,
most quickly divided by the factors of age and
socioeconomic situation. To begin remedying
past errors of communication, I refer to “old
Millennials”and“youngMillennials”inordertotease
out important differences. Additionally, income
inequality runs so rampant among this generation
that both The Economist and The New York Times
have recently questioned why riots have not yet
broken out in the streets. “Why aren’t the poor
storming the barricades?” asks The Economist.
The New York Times blames a lingering, vastly
aggrandized notion of the individual’s importance
in American society (more on that in a moment),
but the tide could soon change.
9
entrepreneurial members of the older Millennial
subset are altogether reinventing the planet.
Earlier this year, the UN speculated that world
hunger could be completely eradicated by 2025;
MIT’s City Farm initiative is developing 12 inch by
12 inch vertical garden bases that could feed an
urban family for months. Elon Musk’s new solar
battery could eventually take homes off the grid.
The sharing economy is teaching us to live—and
thrive—on much less. Social media networks,
though still in their infancy, are teaching us to
extend our circle of caring. When someone gets
married, we emerge from life’s woodwork to post
a quick note of congratulations. The ‘Like’ button—
an older Millennial’s invention—might be a bit silly,
but the sentiment behind it is not.
Vertical Farming: In the future, we
won’t waste so much space.
ONAHOPEFULNOTE
10
We find the states of the American
Millennial in between these sets of
extremes—the prosperous might
of Silicon Valley, the resource-
barren inner cities and emptying
suburbs; those of us who witnessed
Steve Jobs delivering his liminal
iPhone keynote speech in 2007
while gathered around laptops like
campfires, and those of us who
unearthed the YouTube of it years
later, watching it as a historical text.
We will attempt to imagine their
near future without making
generalizations about the few (the
‘wearable tech-loving’ rich people
most often contorted by the media
to represent ‘all Millennials’) at the
expense of ignoring the many (the
90% of Americans who collectively
only control 25% of this nation’s
wealth; the 90% of Americans who
do not currently see a clear place
for themselves in our economic
future as jobs automate or move
overseas).
It is here that we find the
American Millennials.
11
12
13
INCOME
EQUALITY:
IT’S JUST
AMERICAN DREAMIN’
14
15
IWOULDN’TMIND
IWOULDN’TMIND
PAYINGMOREINTAXESIFITWENTTOTHE
THINGSTHATREALLYMATTERED.IFITWENT
TOEDUCATION,TOPEOPLEINPOVERTY,
- Jay-Z
16
AMERICAN FAMILY
INCOME DISTRIBUTION
Source: Integrated Public Use Microdata Series (IPUMS). Unit of analysis is the family.
The initial year is 1959 because the income variables in a decennial census or March
Current Population Surey (CPS) interview refer to the preceding calendar year.
17
and have never lived outside the upper-middle-
class bubble, the danger increases that the people
who have so much influence on the course of the
nation have little direct experience with the lives of
ordinary Americans, and make their judgements
about what’s good for other people based on their
own highly atypical lives.”
AS THE NEW UPPER CLASS INCREASINGLY
CONSISTS OF PEOPLE WHO WERE BORN
INTO UPPER-MIDDLE-CLASS FAMILIES
- Charles A. Murray, “Coming Apart”
“
18
In a nation facing ever-increasing financial inequality,
MILLENNIALS INHERITED AN AMERICAN DREAM
SO FANTASTICALLY UNREALISTIC, THEY HAD NO
CHOICE BUT TO REWRITE IT.
After all, who can afford
a mortgage when they’re
burdened with a trillion
collective dollars in student
debt? Who wants to have
multiple kids amid record
levels of underemployment
and a workforce largely
turning to overseas workers
and robots? Who will ever
retire if Social Security is
slated to run dry in 2033?
If, in the words of Da Vinci,
art lives from constraints and
dies from freedom, then it’s
no wonder that a subset of
older Millennials have become
gloriously inventive. Given the
dire circumstances (and the
historic lack of substantial
government intervention), the
generation’s brightest business
leadersarereinventing100year
legacy business models—from
advertising to automotives—
so quickly it’s as if it’s for sport.
19
PRESIDENT
BARACK
OBAMA
has called our nation’s rising income inequality “The defining
challenge of our time.” If income, for most people, is not
rising, then the only viable solution is to learn to live on less.
Thankfully, this sentiment is the very bedrock of the older
Millennial-created sharing economy.
In a display of considerable vision and might, Airbnb has just launched an ad
campaign for its “Belong Anywhere” tagline. The campaign opens with some
of the most formidable questions that humanity has asked since the dawn of
civilization: “Is man kind? Are we good?” Quickly, the viewer can see Airbnb’s
answer: a resounding, absolute yes. After all, if we can share strangers’ homes,
then there is no such thing as strangers anymore, right? This proposed virtue is
not to be considered lightly, as Airbnb is now one of the most valuable companies
in the world. Look to Airbnb’s model: they are aiding the American middle class
when the government is not (more on that later). While companies their size
routinely deplete the earth of resources, Airbnb uses existing resources.
In a world of increasing inequality, Airbnb is increasing equality.
20
21
OMG,
MILLENNIALS
L I K E ,
A R E S O
ENTITLED
22
MILLENNIALS
MISUNDERSTOOD.
OF BEING
EXPERIENCE
SHARE THE
Trend reports love to assume the
lackadaisical tropes of young adulthood,
making blanket statements like “Millennials
aren’t into politics.” These reports cite stats
describing low voter turnout and a general
distrust in government. Edward Mendelson
embodies this sentiment well in a recent
interview with The Baffler’s John Summers
wherein he says, of today’s youth, “People
who are staring at their cell phones never
rampage. They merely bump into things.”
23
MILLENNIALS
OF BEING
EXPERIENCE
SHARE THE
What Mendelson misses is that even though
thebodypoliticof(especiallyolder)Millennials
may not look the same as that of Boomers
in the 1960s, it exists. In 2012, Reddit co-
founder Aaron Swartz, then 26 years old, led
a national effort to prevent the passage of the
Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) by generating
an online petition and an accompanying
Twitter protest, all without needing to leave
his apartment. As part of this digital protest,
millions of Twitter users changed their profile
pictures to feature an anti-SOPA logo. These
protesters fought against significant odds—
after all, what congressperson understands
anything about the internet, let alone SOPA?—
but the modernist, mobile-era tactics worked:
SOPA was stopped.
24
More recently, New York asked the private tech
sector to help them build a social media platform –
– as a way to adapt government services to the
behavior patterns of younger citizens, rather than
expecting those citizens to change.
SOMETHING MORE LIKE FACEBOOK 311
25
Lastly, in June of 2015, after the Supreme
Court’s monumental marriage ruling served
as a rallying cry for much of the nation, social
media proved a fertile ground for unexpected
amounts of pro-LGBTQ self-expression, with
26MM users altering their personal profile
picture so that it featured a Pride flag. This
idea originated at Facebook, and it had even
bigger intentions than supporting 2015
advances in human rights. As The Atlantic
chronicled, “Facebook is looking at what
factors contributed to a person changing his
or her profile photo, but the implication of
their research is much larger: At stake is our
understanding of whether groups of citizens
can organize online—and how that collective
activity affects larger social movements.”
Old, young, rich and poor Millennials all
support (and consistently have supported)
LGBTQ rights in far greater numbers than
their elder generations, and were an elemental
part of America’s recent sociopolitical
transformation. Millennials’ participation
was essential to the movement, even if their
boldest public act was to add a rainbow filter
to a Facebook profile photo; for a teen in rural
Alabama, that one act might have required
tremendous bravery.
The success of rainbow profiles and
SOPA hashtags demonstrates the sort of
latent generational political potential of
Millennials that academics like Edward
Mendelson consistently miss; however, if a
simple online act yields federal change, then
it is still a protest, and it is absolutely still
revolutionary.
26
GOOD CALL, MARK
27
28
HOPE
29
Yes, Millennials are protesting, though
it does not look like other protesting.
Yes, Millennials are paying attention
to the world around them, even though
their response is different; sometimes
it comes not in the form of a political
dispute, but in the form of a startup that
offers people a better way. Millennials
also remain a young generation, even
in its ‘older’ cohorts. After all, who’s to
underestimate a group of people that,
according to The New York Times’
Clive Thompson, reads and writes more
prolifically than any culture since the
ancient Greeks?
Millennials bring the country not
only hope, but great hope. And this is
certainly not the first time that America’s
aspirations have drastically altered
within the confines of a reality.
YES
MILLENNIALS
PROTESTING
ARE
30
31
1
MILLENNIALS
HOMEAND
32
1THE NEW SELF
SMALL SELFis the
No More Endless Aspiring
to “Strike It Rich;”
33
1THE SINGLE MOST IMPORTANT
trend common to all the
Millennial generational cohorts
is a sharp decrease in interest in
homeownership. This trend will be
thesolebasisofthedeconstruction
andreconstructionoftheAmerican
Dream. Its importance cannot be
overstated.
34
wherein hard work renders economic
ascension possible from any rung in
society. In an era of ever-increasing income
inequality, shrinking natural resources and
continual job outsourcing, this dream has
become especially farcical.
Millennials, unlike the Xers before them, are
notparticularlyinterestedinbuyinghomes,
which to date has been America’s primary
method of wealth accumulation. Weary
of home-as-investment, many Millennials
are decoupling the emotion around the
word ‘home’ from the functional notion of
‘ownership.’ To most Millennials, a rented
home can still be a home if it contains the
people (and pets) that you love.
CENTURIES
AGO
AMERICAWASBUILT
ONTHEBACKOFA
HORATIOALGER-STYLE
RAGS-TO-RICHES
FANTASY,
35
In the recent words of The Washington
Post: “The homeownership rate in
the U.S. has been tumbling since the
height of the housing boom. Fewer and
fewer of us own our homes — because
foreclosures claimed them from us, or
because the housing bust taught us to be
wary, or because the economy ensured
that families who might have bought in
the past can’t afford a home today.”
This shift has occurred for a host of
very powerful reasons. An American
economy predicated, since 1942, on
selling Americans home mortgages
they can’t afford, therefore tethering
them to organization life and stabilizing
the GDP—went dreadfully awry in 2008.
How dreadfully awry?
From the end of World War II to the
beginning of the housing bubble in 1997,
American housing prices actually stayed
quite stable. However, between 1997 and
2006, the price of the typical American
home increased by 124%.
A N D T H E N
I T A L L
C O L L A P S E D .
Millennials watched parents, aunts and
uncles, and other adults be ravaged by
the financial crisis of 2008.
36
1
DOOMS
DAYJUMBO
MCMANSION
MORTGAGE
for the
37
Consider the ignominious vastness of the classic,
Midwest American 1990s Toll Brothers great room:
itsvaultedceilingsdesignedalmostpurposefullyto
bleed heat in the winter and air conditioning in the
summer. Since this unaffordable room’s heyday,
Americans’ tastes may have collectively changed
for the better. It’s a bit of a stretch, but one of Steve
Jobs’ greatest legacies was in teaching the world
that the design of something really matters, that its
ingenuity is the aggregate of choices made about
its features, materials, longevity, environmental
impact, and overall aesthetic appeal. Perhaps, in
the wake of such teachings, it’s become too hard
to go from admiring the thoughtful curves and
proportions of a smartphone (or a well-done IKEA
item, or a Shake Shack burger, or a Toms Shoe-
-the thoughtfully-designed-ordinary-object list is
too long to continue) to then facing the usual Toll
Brothers chicanery.
Dreams Deferred: The Bluth family
home in “Arrested Development”
38
1LESS
SMALLER,
SMARTER HOMES
Natural Resources
39
Another important move is the potential
departure of the ideal home being a large
home. According to CNN, as of 2014, “The
average size of homes built last year hit 2,600
square feet, an all-time high that surpassed
even the housing bubble years, when homes
averaged around 2,400 square feet.”
Now that many Americans have been priced
out of owning such homes, the simplicity
of tiny homes is beginning to hold broader
appeal. Like the best trends, tiny homes
will increase in popularity partially due to
necessity (most Millennials will not have
another option) and partially from cultural
ingenuity. After all, if you have less home, you
have considerably fewer expenses, which can
be a great thing.
“A tiny house costs anywhere between $10,000
and $40,000 to build, with the average being
just $23,000. At such low prices, it’s no wonder
that 68 percent of tiny house owners don’t have
a mortgage. It’s been estimated that Millennials
are the newest and largest group of potential
homebuyers. However, more than 50 percent
rent because they can’t afford the initial down
payment. Tiny housing, as a result, can be an
appealing alternative, particularly since many
Millennials live alone or don’t have children.”
As recently noted by real estate
investor Marco Rubel:
40
Tiny home terms are wonderfully practical
Concurrently, Tesla’s home battery will only make the small
home and the eco home more possible (and more affordable).
41
The Verge, in an article titled “Why Tesla’s
Battery For Your Home Should Terrify
Utilities,” suggested what follows:
“The prospect of cheap solar panels
combined with powerful batteries has
been a source of significant anxiety in
the utility sector. Suddenly regulated
monopolies are finding themselves in
competition with their own customers.” An
Edison Electric Institute report suggested
that the transition could be as abrupt as
the shift from landlines to cell phones.
FORECAST STORAGE MARKET
from GTM Research
0
200
400
600
800
1000
1200
2011 2012 2013 2013E 2015E 2016E 2017E 2018E
$57
$140
$56 $42
$144
$380
$563
$1,001
Residential (Million $)
Non-Residential (Million $)
42
Cumulatively, the aspiration to ‘live
onless’couldbethesinglegreatest
thing to happen to America’s
middle class since FDR’s New
Deal. Ending a cycle of endless,
mindless consumption could
enable Americans to live lives
they can afford and find meaning
through nature and community.
43
1
BEST-
FRIENDS
The
new American Dream
-AS-FAMILY
44
Recently, trending topics on social media show an
American populace intrigued by a killer new idea
about home, community and meaning: instead of a
McMansion, why not aspire to live in a “bestie row”
of eco-houses, alongside your nearest and dearest?
DOESN’T
THAT
SOUND
LIKE A
LOT MORE
FUN?
45
“I’m happy to see the little-house movement
taking off. If anything ‘good’ came out of the
recession, it was people hitting reset and
realizing they don’t need so much space and
stuff to be happy. I feel proud to be working
with clients who have had that realization, that
less is more.”
The ‘Bestie Row’ architect
on the viral phenomena of the article:
46
This new notion of
HITTING IT BIG
BY KEEPING IT SMALL
is about so much more than the size of one’s
house. Journalists (in places like Medium
Matter, The New York Times and The New
Yorker) are beginning to question Americans’
ceaseless quest for grandiosity on a spiritual
as well as material level, almost as if the latter
made room for the former. David Brooks has
become especially curious about the topic
lately, with his article on life’s purpose gaining
such groundswell momentum that he’s now
launched a full series of articles on the topic,
as well as a portion of the NYT’s website where
readers can submit their own essays on the matter.
A prefabricated
home
47
48
2
49
2
MILLENNIALS
COMMUNITY
AND
50
2TRUST
The Sudden, Wild,
Unexpected
Evolution of
51
As previously noted, Airbnb
has become one of the most
valuable companies in the
world in just a handful of years.
Older Millennials have warmed
to the idea, getting over the
‘creepy’ part of staying in
someone else’s house to now
fully embrace it, and younger
Millennials have never known
an adult world without it.
52
AIRBNBAIRBNB: NOT SOME RICH PEOPLE THING
In very heartening news,
Airbnb’s June 2015 study
of its American user base
revealed that the company
has not created some rich
kid’s global playground. The
report, titled “The Impact
of Airbnb on Middle Class
Income Stagnation”, cites
that the company is no less
than “an economic lifeline,
making it possible to pay the
bills and make ends meet.”
Aside from being the powerful
driver of positive change for
whathadbecomeanincredibly
corrupthousingmarket,Airbnb
has created something else
that will continue to reshape
the American socioeconomic
system: more trust. Again,
note the lack of government
intervention and the reliance
of Millennial startup invention.
In order to share someone’s home, you first have
to trust them. This idea sounds simpler and less
pervasive that it really is: soon our credit scores
will be 90% based on our ‘social’ scores, a very
logical step in a world of sharing economies
that depend on us being highly trustworthy
and generally well-intended toward each other.
Mistreat an Airbnb home, leave the place a
mess? Maybe American Express won’t want you
as a Gold cardmember. This is karma’s (slightly
creepy, yet slightly inevitable) shining moment.
Sharing America: Building A Bedrock of Trust
53
BFROM A SCHOLAR AT THE UNIVERSITY OF WARWICK COMES THIS MODEL:
More positively, trust actually begets the
creation of more trust. It could easily be
argued that the public nature of the sharing
economy actually makes us better people.
From a psychological standpoint, knowing
that others are watching increases our
desire to impress.
54
2SHARING
THE SAD
The bright
future of
reality of
privacy
55
“Technology develops
cumulatively, rather than
in isolated heroic acts.”
Jared Diamond,
Guns, Germs and Steel
56
“[In the future] there will be chips all over
the high street relaying information and you
will be bombarded with digital information
everywhere you go. You will need a digital
bubble force field — a shield that lets
through what you want and blocks
everything else.”
Ian Pearson,
futurist, 2005
57
itsuseswillquicklyproliferate.Thenew
social score will be used everywhere.
Unfortunately there is, so far, a lack of
privacy around such data (though in
the future it’s not a stretch to imagine
a second type of sharing economy
proliferating, based off a more Bitcoin-
like notion of private, encrypted, but
still-validated trust).
Millennials,youngandold,richandpoor,
are yet to see any real repercussion
from so much of their data and identity
now being fully accessible. As a result,
they largely don’t care about internet
security when polled on the matter.
ONCE THE
TRUST GRID EXISTS,
A screenshot from my location history in Google Maps, one of Google’s lesser-known
features. Google has an archive of my every single location for the past 5+ years. This
morning, you’ll see, I commuted from my home in DUMBO to the New York office of
Ogilvy & Mather. With the bottom slider you can see that I left home at 8:30, got out
of the subway at 9:10 and arrived at Ogilvy at 9:20.
This is the kind of tracking that currently does
not concern American Millennials.
58
IT WILL ULTIMATELY BE THE
MILLENNIALS’ RESPONSIBILITY
to continue Ed Snowden’s planet-
altering work in protecting human
privacy, and given the generation’s
collective lack of concern for the
matter, privacy might be something
Generation Z has to fix.
Additionally, the generation’s sense
of humor and current ‘who cares’
attitude toward public surveillance
have had an interesting effect on
the broader culture. Case in point:
in a desperate grasp at relevance,
the CIA emerged on Twitter in
mid-2014 as if the agency was
entering a bar at happy hour,
greeting a bunch of pals from
work. Interesting tonality choice,
given the agency’s foreign
and domestic roles in society;
seemingly one only the ¯_(:/)_/¯
Millennial era could yield.
59
Everyone’s a Comedian: The CIA makes an appeal to Millennial youth with its first tweet.
60
3
61
3MILLENNIALS
TRANSPORTATION
AND
62
3
An overhaul of life expectations
and living situations will
inevitably produce an influential
overhaul of the transportation
system. Though the sharing
economy is set to transform
too many lines of business to
detail here, transportation is
important for 3 reasons:
IT REFLECTS
IT ALTERS
IT AFFECTS
ANOTHER RAPID
TRANSFORMATION IN
MILLENNIALS’ CORE VALUES
OUR RELATIONSHIP
TO COMMUNITY
AND GOVERNMENT
THE EVERYDAY.
O3
O2
O1
63
3CARIN AMERICA
The meaning of a
64
Cars have meant different things to
older and younger Millennials. Older
Millennials counted the days until they
could get their permits and licenses
as teens, and the freedom a car
provided was the definitive adolescent
milestone.
Their first cell phone was the freedom.
Who wants to fight with parents about
going to visit a girl, when you could
not fight with them and text her from
the safety of your room instead? Less
than 50% of younger Millennials have
even bothered to get a license when
they legally could. That percentage
continues to drop every year.
YOUNGER MILLENNIALS?
Couldn’t care less.
Freedom, Old Millennials-Style
Freedom, Young Millennials-Style: The popular messaging app Kik
65
Younger Millennials might really be onto
something: from a safety standpoint, it’s
probably a good thing that cars are becoming
a commodity. Younger Millennials have
largely already dismissed the idea of owning
a car. Again, the pattern of this generation’s
ability to completely dismiss century-old
ritual and expectation is apparent.
THEYARETOTALLY
COOLWITHWILD
AMOUNTSOF
CHANGE.
66
3
TRANSPORTATION’S
EQUALITY
ISSUE
67
HELICOPTERS
BUSES
AIRPLANES
LONG CAR RIDES
BOATS
Blade
Bridj, RidePal
NetJets
Split
Coastalyfe, GetMyBoat
THOUGH
EVERY
TYPE OF
TRANSPORT
NOW HAS
ITS “UBER,”
CURRENTLY THERE’S
A DOWNSIDE FOR MANY
MILLENNIALS.
These new transport methods are
currently accompanied by extreme
income inequality, and will be so
for at least the foreseeable future.
There is a ripple effect to this sort
of en masse privatization that has
a serious effect on broader society.
As The New York Times notes,
“Santa Clara County Valley
TransportationAuthorityexecutives
note that 20 percent of the workers
who ride the private tech fleets
between San Francisco and Silicon
Valley would have otherwise used
public transit. The dark outlook
presented by the explosion of
private transit systems is that an
elite class of tech workers will be
moved in style, while the overall
quality of transit will decline.”
In the long haul, there is still
reason for optimism. For example,
Helsinki’s goal is to go car-free. In
the meantime, transport is another
form of inequality that less affluent
Millennials will have to contend
with in order to succeed.
68
69
MILLENNIALS
CAREERAND
70
“Weshoulddoawaywiththeabsolutelyspeciousnotion
that everybody has to earn a living. It is a fact today that
one in ten thousand of us can make a technological
breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest. The
youth of today are absolutely right in recognizing this
nonsense of earning a living. We keep inventing jobs
because of this false idea that everybody has to be
employed at some kind of drudgery because, according
to Malthusian Darwinian theory he must justify his
right to exist. So we have inspectors of inspectors and
people making instruments for inspectors to inspect
inspectors. The true business of people should be to
go back to school and think about whatever it was they
were thinking about before somebody came along and
told them they had to earn a living.”
― R. Buckminster Fuller, 1960
71
WITH
LESS HOUSE,
LESS (OWNED) STUFF,
LESS MORTAGE,
YOU NEED LESS JOB
LESS FAMILY,
LESS CAR,
(the birthrate is at a historic low,
and continues to drop every year)
Consider what that insight
could mean for the Millennial
era of the American economy
in that one aforementioned
question:
What happens to the future
of employment when it’s no
longer an economic necessity
to be employed?
72
RIP, Boomer and Xer-style employment.
We’ll miss your excellent office accessories.
73
IS
THETHE
TRUTHIS
America
already isn’t
fully employed.
That’s been the economic
reality for the entire Obama
administration—and it’s time for
our culture to start improving and
reflecting the new status quo,
rather than trying to ‘hope’ it into
becoming something it’s not.
74
A recent piece in The Atlantic titled
examines the stark truth that
many former American hubs of
manufacturing are now ghost
towns, and many of America’s
most popular careers will
soon be automated. The top 4
professionsintheUSalone—retail
salesperson, cashier, food and
beverage server, and office clerk—
are professions that employ a full
15.4 million Americans, or 10%
of our workforce. All of these
professions (and many more)
are at substantial risk of being
outsourced to software in the
very, very near future.
“ “
And the article goes on to note:
“In 1964, the nation’s most valuable company, AT&T,
was worth $267 billion in today’s dollars and employed
758,611 people. Today’s telecommunications giant,
Google, is worth $370 billion but has only about 55,000
employees—less than a tenth the size of AT&T’s
workforce in its heyday.
...The share of prime-age Americans (25 to 54 years
old) who are working has been trending down since
2000. Among men, the decline began even earlier: the
share of prime-age men who are neither working nor
looking for work has doubled since the late 1970s, and
has increased as much throughout the recovery as it
did during the Great Recession itself.”
THE END OF WORK
75
						in the country’s
economics that more Millennials, old and young, rich
and poor, will learn to live without holding down full-
time jobs.
There will be numerous, obvious upsides. New cultures
will emerge around ‘working without work.’ Needing
more structured ways to busy themselves, communal
efforts born from a sharing economy-style ethos will
emerge,inwhichpeoplecanderivethesenseofpersonal
satisfaction and purpose that comes from working
efforts that don’t necessarily pay in money. Think back
to the WPA from FDR’s New Deal, and you can start to
imagine how diverse skillsets could be put to use en
masse (even though likely, with the Republican Party’s
current interest in small government, it will be startups
that offer Millennials these services, or at least broker
them through the appropriate government agencies,
not the government agents directly themselves).
IT IS WITH THIS CHANGE
1930s Economic Revival & The WPA: As
much about art as it was about industry
76
Canoe House, University of Iowa:
One of the WPA’s loveliest legacies
77
Working for satisfaction and not money is actually
quite realistic. After all, we do ‘make’ things in our
spare time: we created Wikipedia and we upload
400,000 hours of YouTube video every day. We make
so much stuff online that the IDC projects that the
digital universe will reach 40 zettabytes (ZB) by 2020.
78
The Columbus Idea Foundry: The world’s largest makerspace is in Ohio.
It helps those displaced by a changing global economy find a way to ‘do’ things
again, and is credited with representing the future of communal space.
79
Academics are studying the many
ways to make a life without a high
annual income. As one expert says
in The End of Work,
“A lot of people in the [under-
employed] cities make post-wage
arrangements, working for tenancy
under the table, or trading services.”
Full time corporate employment
is, after all, a relatively new notion
in American history, an evolution
of post-agrarian industry. Perhaps
as technology improves, we’ll
migrate back to a more agrarian
model, albeit with the aid of a
thousand wonderful adventures
that our grandparents could never
have dreamed of.
(And more on that in a minute.)
80
3
WHITE
COLLAR
AMERICA ‘Startup’ will lose a
lot of its reverie
81
3
Much in the way that top
universities are responding
to the presence of startups
by becoming more like
startups (online learning,
venture-funded programs,
etc.) big corporate jobs will
soon modernize by acting
more like the startups
that compete with them.
For those lucky enough to
remain in America’s white
collar workforce in ten
years, this transformation
will be quite beneficial.
82
Startup life, however, will start to lose
its luster once venture capital funding
normalizes and the market corrects;
the VC industry is currently enjoying
its current all-time investment high
(over $52B in total last year). The fires
of this enthusiasm remained fanned
by IPOs like Twitter, which is some-
how still a publicly traded company
despite being unable to retain users,
grow users, turn a profit or innovate.
The primary reason that startup
jobs will become less revered by
highly educated, experienced, aging
Millennials? The industry’s base
expectation that all employees take
salaries at significantly less value
than they’re worth, on the (very) off-
chancethatstockoptionswillvestand
the company will IPO. Estimates vary,
but approximately 97% of startups
see no such wealth-creating exit.
These talented minds are therefore
currently accepting less money to
make less money, and often for years
of their careers—with no upside
attached other than a branded hoodie
and some free lunch. Such economic
dalliances are unconcerning to the
young only: no parent thinks lightly of
taking a 60% pay cut.
College/Startup Mashup:
Stanford’s Venture Studio
83
, Fortune 500 companies will lure talent by starting to borrow
the best aspects of startup culture (project-based work, clearer upsides
for successes, agile teams) as Millennials take over the C-suite roles and
implement the ideas of their startup brethren. White collar careers will
soon look more like a pastiche of activities, a mosaic, rather than a linear
ascension. Having a side hustle will not only be standard, but encouraged,
because it means your employees possess a richer myriad of skills. The
company man can now have a company on the side.
INSTEAD
Man-children at work and
play in the offices of Hooli,
the thinly veiled parody of
Google from the hit HBO
show “Silicon Valley”
84
4
GLOBAL,
MALLEABLE
HYBRID
COMPANIES
“Another shakedown
on shakedown street.”
- The Grateful Dead
85
MESSAGES SENT PER DAY (BILLIONS)
Sources: Portio Research, a16z; The Economist, 2015
“WhatsApp and other over-the-top
services are projected to drain global
telecommunications companies
of $386 billion in revenue between
2012 and 2018 from the use of OTT
mobile voice calling alone. Could
most telecommunications service
providers survive a decline like this in
a core business?”
- The Global Center for Digital
Business Transformation
0
5
10
15
20
25
30
1996 2000 2005 2010 2015
(forecasted)
SMS WhatsApp
86
In other words, Samsung Electronics’ competition is
no longer LG and Sony, it’s any company that feels like
dabbling in screens. Both Facebook and Google have
successfully proven to be capable of truly unanticipated,
agile crossover: Facebook is deep in mobile payments,
Google is working on curing cancer, and Amazon owns
small business cloud. Not bad for a digital Rolodex, a
search engine, and a bookseller.
The term sometimes used here is “combinatorial
innovation,” an idea credited to Hal Varian, the Chief
Economist at Google and a Professor Emeritus at
the University of California, Berkeley. Combinatorial
innovation is steeped in the history of mechanization,
and it predicts that businesses in various industries
will rapidly and unexpectedly “combine” to form new
products. This is the theory that could have predicted
Facebook becoming Western Union and Google a
medical research lab.
IT’S NOT JUST
THAT INDUSTRIES
WILL BE
REINVENTED, BUT
THAT THEY WILL
ALSO CROSS-
POLLINATE.
IN THE FUTURE ECONOMY,
87
The implications for such innovation are daunting: it’s one
thing for companies to track their top competitors, and
another for every company to be a potential competitor.
Whereas now most market disruption comes from
startups, corporate intra-preneurs will gain prominence
in the future, as they help prepare long-established
companies for wild crossover.
It is interesting here to note that talent nurturing and
identification will be one of the primary challenges
during the next wave of Millennial work: Facebook itself
famously turned down hiring Whatsapp founder Brian
Acton in 2009 (as did Twitter), instead opting to pay
out $19B for his company just a handful of years later.
(Even Millennials sometimes struggle to identify fellow
talented Millennials!) Given that the global industry’s
new norm will be incessant disruption, figuring out who
has the special gift for ‘knowing what’s next’ will prove
an exceptionally important challenge.
88
Hearteningly, companies are
emerging to help established,
important companies hire
more diversely, since diversity
of experience and thought
will be absolutely crucial to
future innovation. Entelo has
built an algorithm that helps
HR departments find perfect
candidates outside their
“normal” (predominantly affluent,
predominantly white) hunting
grounds. It has been statistically
proven that companies with
women on their boards
outperform those without. It is
hopeful that Millennials, who
ushered in the era of LGBTQ
rights, will be more open to this
critical change than the Xers and
Boomers who preceded them.
The $19B hiring whoopsies.
89
The Entelo Team: An HR startup that
helps companies hire more diversely
90
4THE MICRO STARTUP
THE NEW
STARTUP
91
4
Startup culture won’t go away—
not in the slightest—but it will
evolve and improve. The tools of
mass production democratized
by the internet all but insist on
the continuation of industry
disruption by small companies.
However the norms around
what a startup is and is not will
change.
THE MICRO STARTUP
92
A crop of different startups will soon emerge with different
goals—comfortably supporting 3-5 employees and their
families and realistic, long-term growth—rather than
vaulting their debt into the stratosphere on the back of
phony ‘valuation’ calculations, hoping for a huge exit or an
IPO. These new, smaller ventures will sometimes be funded,
sure, and sometimes the funding will come from traditional
VC investors, for more reasonable terms. Sometimes
funding will also come from larger corporations, as a way
for those corporations to retain top talent and have access
to fresh IP in a style of employment the talent finds less
constraining. Most white collar Millennials see less need for
a 9-to-5 office culture than their older counterparts.
93
will hopefully widen the entrepreneur
aperture, allowing non-white, non-
affluent, non-male, non-Ivy League
citizens to start a startup. After
all, the fortunes left to be made in
Silicon Valley involve innovating for
the 99%, not the 1%. Bill Gates’ vision
was a computer in every home, not
a computer in the richest homes.
The ideas that better life for the 99%
won’t occur to Silicon Valley without
significant culture change.
THIS LEVELING OUT
OF THE ECONOMIC
PLAYING FIELD
Coldhubs: A brilliant startup for the 99%. In developing countries, almost half of
the produced food rots in the sun; Coldhubs provides solar-powered refrigeration
for an affordable fee. These are the billionaires of the future.
94
4
R E T I R
E M E N T
R E T I R
E M E N T
OF
95
4
96
Millennials are considerably under-financed,
which is why they have no choice but to
start living on significantly less. As they age,
additional factors will continue to bear down
on their financial future:
1.
2.
3.
4.
SOCIALSECURITYISUNDER-FUNDED
MILLENNIALS’LIFEEXPECTANCYWILLINCREASE
COLLEGEDEBTWON’TDISAPPEAR
ROBOTIZATIONOFTHEWORKFORCEISEXPECTED
TOCUTBLUE(ANDWHITE)COLLARJOBS
97
Millennials will work through their lives, potentially
changing professions, but nonetheless working.
As Slate points out, “The notion of retirement is
a relatively new invention. A century ago, 7 in 10
over-65s in the United Kingdom were working.
Today, about 2 in 10 are. (Similar changes
have happened in the United States.)”
Additionally, when Otto von Bismark created
the notion of a state-funded retirement
pension in the 1880s, life expectancy upon
hitting age 65 was a mere 18 more months.
Now, it’s 23 years.
NO LONGER WILL THEY RETIRE
98
Luckily, the purpose of technology is to make
life better and cheaper. New business models
are already emerging, creating entirely new
layers of work. The European-based startup
La Ruche Qui Dit Oui is attempting to usurp
the grocery store for a market of local sellers,
each covering off the production of a different
bit of produce or good.
Imagine a world in which you spend two days
a week harvesting tomatoes, and then trade
your tomatoes for the other things you need
in the market.
La Ruche Qui Dit Oui doesn’t just represent an
accurate depiction of how artisans functioned
in past economies; it represents many hard-
driving venture capitalists’ vision of the future.
Union Square Ventures recently led a $9MM
round of funding for the startup (and, of
course, all of the accompanying proprietary
technology that makes scaling and running
such markets so much easier than it was in
the 1600s!).
Imagine a life in Millennials’ older years wherein
theirprimaryfinancialobligationistocontribute
their week’s harvest, or their handmade chairs
and tables to the communally-operated
farmer’s market. Life and career can become
a continual exploration, not a beginning
followed by an end.
99
A La Ruche Qui Dit Oui market in Europe
100
5
101
5MILLENNIALS
COMMUNICATIONS
AND
102
5FACEBOOK’S
COMING SECOND ERA
OF SUCCESS
103
5“Facebook is building an
incredible moat around
the future of social with
Messenger and WhatsApp.”
– Dan Frommer, qz
104
IMAGINE A NEAR FUTURE WHERE
INSTEAD OF HAVING 50 APPS ON YOUR
PHONE, YOU HAVE ONE APP.
That app that can easily cue
up 50 different APIs in a couple
of commands to keystrokes,
engaging companies like Uber,
Foursquare, Facebook, Airbnb,
Kayak and beyond. This is how
we’ll all use the mobile internet
in 2-3 years. This style of
communication, of course,
will be brought to the world by
a subset of entrepreneurial,
mostly older Millennials.
What makes Messenger, What’s App, Line and WeChat so special?
105
5
GO
EAST,YOUNG MAN,
GO EAST
106
“Here in Western markets, if you
want to interact with a service
from your phone, you either visit
its mobile website or, more likely,
you download the app. In China’s
WeChat and other services across
Asia, the services you may want
to interact with are right there in
your messenger. There’s no need
to download an app: It’s as if you
could just tap on an app in the App
Store and start using it within the
App Store app. This model will be
at least somewhat disruptive to
Google (because it could cut away
from Search) and Apple (because it
could cut away from the App Store).”
Union Square Ventures’ Brian
Libov recently wrote about the future
of messages, explaining Eastern
innovations like WeChat accordingly:
107
One of the most promising facets of the
WeChat economy is the company’s broad
user base: everyone is using WeChat’s
services, shopping interfaces, payment
tools, and entertainment vehicles—not just
privileged few, the rich people, like in America.
Here, apps are largely a trend of the affluent.
60% of people making under $40,000/year
don’t download apps onto their smartphones.
Over 90% of those lower income users do use
texting, though, which is why introducing new
services to the familiar medium of texting will
drastically increase penetration among less
affluent older and younger Millennials.
108
SERVICES LIKE FACEBOOK
MESSENGER WILL REPLACE EVERY
COMPANY’S 1-800 NUMBERS.
In the very, very near future,
Image: Brian Libov
All of this chat functionality will yield
far greater fluidity between strangers
looking to communicate with each
other from an enterprise standpoint,
as well. The ‘walls’ of companies will
become porous. The monolith, relatively
immutable notion of ‘brand’ becomes
somewhat disempowered in this
environment, where more human-to-
human interaction is added into the mix.
109
HotelTonight (which sells last minute hotel
rooms at heavily discounted rates) has just
releasedanewconciergefeaturecalledAces.
HotelTonight staffers replace, via text, the
concierge staffers presumably sitting in the
lobby downstairs. (This is perfect example
of many Millennials preferring one mode of
communication, text—and preferring it for
years—with traditional businesses refusing
to change their practices.) In HotelTonight’s
words, the new feature is “perfect for the
always-on-the-go business traveler, those
checking out a city they’ve never visited
before, or anyone who just wants to plan
less, live more, and let someone else handle
the details.”
CASEINPOINT
HotelTonight’s Ace app. Note the casual
language and the sincerity of the
intrapersonal interaction.
110
Investor Chris Messina is cultivating a list of
these “conversational commerce” startups
on Product Hunt, all almost entirely founded
by affluent Millennials. The list is already 100
companies long. Ideas include things like “Text
a Stanford Nerd,” wherein anyone can asked a
question or seek longer term assistance from
an appropriate ‘nerd’ at Stanford University.
That could be helpful not just for students, but
anyadult.Imaginehowhelpfulsuchcompanies
will be to the world once they are able to expand
past the early-adopting 1%?
111
5
¡NO
MA
NCH
ES!
112
Another compelling facet of WeChat is that
it is semantically sophisticated, capable
of deciphering slang in a dozen different
languages (including Latin!). Soon there will be
far less significant barriers between any two
people in the world communicating with each
other. Not internet access, not language, not
platform. Line, Japan’s WeChat, has inspired
the creation of streams of incredibly detailed
“sticker sets,” which convey nuanced emotions
and situations via picture.
In America, amid Millennials old and young,
Emoji and Bitmoji communicate not only
concepts (hamburger!) but entire worlds
of emotion (‘hamburger’ can equal ennui,
generalist American indulgence culture,
plainness/expectedness, etc etc). Like Line
stickers, Bitmoji can be especially expressive,
linking popular phrases (“I can’t even!”) to a
corresponding image, allowing someone who
might not get the words to learn them by the
picture. Bitmojis effectively can translate a
slang phrase while teaching it. This ability will
prove especially helpful with languages like
Spanish, where much of the popular slang
uses words in ways that aren’t even close to
their official meaning.
For example:
A Line sticker from Japan.
113
5
NEVER
UNDERESTIMATE
GIF
the
114
MOST INTERESTING
OF ALL IS THE GIF,
or the short, animated clip most usually
plucked from a popular film or TV show.
GIFs are extra interesting because
they can have two meanings: the literal
happening in the clip (Tina Fey as Liz
Lemon from 30 Rock, sarcastically
rolling her eyes at Jack Donaghy, her
male boss), which pretty much anyone
can understand and be amused by,
regardless of their familiarity with the
show; and, a secondary, more furtive-
yet-fun meaning to those fully in on
the context of the clip, or those who
are familiar enough with the referenced
television show to get additional ins and
outs of the joke.
115
GIFscanalsoassumenewmeaningsovertime,asblog
commentators, writers, and regular friends on social
media re-appropriate them for specific instances, thus
adding to a video or image’s set of implied references.
For example, a GIF or an image of a cross-eyed cat
can start out as a substitute for saying “I’m out of it.”
Later, a popular internet personality can look at the
GIF and assume a more nuanced explanation of its
circumstance: “When you’re drunk af [as fuck] but you
need to act all serious for a sec.” ‘Tired, out of it’ kitten
is now ‘drunk-but-feigning-interest’ kitten. When the
image is referenced in a blog comment after, say, a
post on a presidential candidate, it assumes both
meanings. Those in on the more furtive one can have
a good snicker.
116
Note the purposefully maligned grammar: this style of lingual
play, which probably first appeared in “I Can Has Cheezburger?”
in the early 2000s, was initially relegated to translating and
anthropomorphizing the supposed internal monologues of pets.
After all, animals can’t speak English, so if a cat somehow found its
way to the keyboard and typed up its thoughts, its grammar should
come off slightly mauled.
117
5ZERODEGREES
SEPARATION
of
118
5
As messaging, new language
forms, and global “inside jokes”
allow for a true communal
conversation, some startups are
having fun with the notion that
there is no longer such thing as
STRANGERS
119
	 is a startup that’s seen
phenomenal popularity come from a very simple
idea—set an alarm, and a random stranger will call
to wake you up. Wakie calls itself a “social alarm
clock.” People have been reveling in this delight (as
well as the positive psychological effects—you can
scream at an automated alarm, but when a person
calls up, they elicit a very different reaction!).
Wakie’s fans swear by the the moment of pure
serendipity as a fresh way to start their day. Wakie
simply, brilliantly cuts to the most important of
human truths: that we’re all in this together, and
we need every reminder of our unity that we can
get. The less automated, more human, the better.
WAKIE
120
5
ACTUAL
HUMAN
EDITORS
Recode, June 2015
There’s a Shiny New
Trend in Social Media:
“
“
121
5
The next round of technological
innovation will get more
predictive—Google’s Now can
already help you avoid missing
your flight due to a forming
traffic jam on I-78—but it will
also get more emotive, and
human, too.
122
Apple’s latest maneuvers around reinventing
music were all about hiring the humans
behind Beats. Less API, more IQ. Apple
isn’t unique. “In the past months, Twitter,
Instagram and YouTube all announced new
curation features that rely on humans to sift
through and select the best content from
their massive collections of user posts.”
YouTube has announced a partnership with
Storyful to build a new kind of newswire,
one that lets eyewitnesses immediately
contribute video and commentary to
breaking stories. In a matter of minutes
or even seconds, Storyful’s editors verify
the veracity of the source, and the breaking
story is told with previously unimaginable
context. This is the new, true future of
crowdsourced journalism.
Under the aegis of human editors,
young Millennials will partner with news
organizations to contribute stories,
interviews, videos, and other components
of journalism more earnestly. Imagine, in a
year or two, receiving some sort of title and
official badge from The New York Times, for
getting a gripping first-responder video of a
forming protest? Imagine going out of your
way to interview several of the organizers,
and the Times not only verifying but using
your piece? Imagine how great that would
look to a potential employer? This is the
future of crowd publishing. Older Millennials
and their rambling Tumblrs will quickly
become a digital vestige.
A NEW KIND
OF NEWSWIRE
123
5MILLENNIALS
& THE NEWS
QUIT YOUR JOB AND MAKE $10K
A DAY AFTER YOU READ THIS!
A subset of older white-collar Millennials
will potentially be remembered for their
attempt to destroy the news industry. By
either starting or supporting (by means
of their eyeballs) a toxic marshland of
purposefully obfuscated ‘journalismism’
sites like Buzzfeed, The Huffington Post,
Fusion, Thought Catalog, Elite Daily, and
dozens more, Millennials have often
stopped caring where the hell their
information comes from, and whether or
not it’s right.
124
is perhaps the best (as in truly the worst)
example of this type of sensationalist business
model in action; the company has tossed
journalism and advertisements into a blender
and hit the ‘Pulverize’ button.
“[Marissa] Mayer is now banking on an
overtly corrupt model of digital journalism
to help stanch Yahoo’s steady hemorrhage
of ad revenue. What Mayer is pleased to
call the site’s stable of ‘digital magazines’
is, in reality, the barest of fig leaves
for an orgy of sponsored content—i.e.,
copy commissioned, inspected, and
(increasingly) edited by advertisers,
and misleadingly packaged as reliable,
independent journalism in order to win
eyeballs and reader trust.”
Y A H O O
Its failings are perhaps best summarized by noted
writer and former Yahoo editor Chris Lehmann:
125
Like the response to the ‘pink
meat’ of McDonald’s by the
food industry, a Shake Shack
will eventually emerge to
triumphantly to assume a more
well-intended, noble place in the
journalism world. The purposeful
obfuscation of advertisements
will end. It just might take some
subset of Generation Z to do it.
Accurate diagram of an era that we
hopefully leave behind (The Baffler)
126
5
SILICON VALLEY’S
NEW ERA OF ADVERTISING:
FROM PUBLIC RELATIONS TO
PUBLIC RELATIONSHIPS
127
5
“Americans
wouldn’t care if
90% of brands
disappeared
tomorrow.”
- Havas Media to The Guardian -
128
IT’S REALLY HARD TO GET PEOPLE TO CARE
ABOUT BIG COMPANIES. IT’S MUCH EASIER TO
GET PEOPLE TO CARE ABOUT PEOPLE.
One important trend from the
Millennial era (and a definite
carryover from Steve Jobs) is the
CEO public address. Google doesn’t
have to buy 30 second spots during
the World Cup to land themselves
on the front page of every influential
paper and blog; instead, like the
world’s other innovative, powerful
startups and companies, they
routinely hold public conferences to
explain three very important things:
O3
O2
O1
WHAT THEY’RE MAKING
WHY THEY’RE MAKING IT
HOW IT WILL MAKE BOTH INDIVIDUALS’
(AND THE WORLD’S) EXISTENCES BETTER
129
ElonMuskannouncingTESLAEnergy
Xiaomi, Apple, Google, Facebook, Uber,
Spotify, Alibaba, Tesla, and Starbucks: these
are just a few of the companies whose
executives frequently take to the stage to
explain their new plans in plain English. As
a result, traditional marketing products and
practices can look positively Byzantine to
Millennials. If it’s great, if it’s noble, why
not just step outside, take some questions,
show some pictures and explain it? Apple
takes this process so seriously they’ve just
built themselves a new amphitheatre.
130
131
MILLENNIALS
COMMERCE
AND
132
6SILICON
VALLEY
THE LOVE MACHINE
133
6“You want to know how to
paint a perfect painting?
It’s easy. Make yourself
perfect and then just paint
naturally.”
- Robert M. Pirsig,
Zen and the Art of
Motorcycle Maintenance
134
SILICON VALLEYis obsessed with making your shopping experience
perfect.The minute each transaction is complete,
startups love to ask the user, “Did you love it?”
Here’s the de facto Uber-style 1-5 star rating system
that many mobile commerce companies prefer:
See how easy it is to give love, from 1-5? How
easy it is to complain? Offer a suggestion? Ask for
more information? Comparatively, can corporate
America say that it cares about how each and
every one of its transactions is received?
135
	 of Millennials in America
now have smartphones. Regardless of how
innovative a category is, to a smartphone-
bearing Millennial, its competition is the
latest set of shopping standards and
experiences created by Silicon Valley.
Here are three trends that will shape
commerce, as more thoughtful living
(tiny homes, communal cars, rented
goods, kaleidoscope careers, sharing and
community) begets more thoughtful buying.
90%
136
PRODUCT
O1
DISTRIBUTION
O2
CRITICAL
O3
RECEPTION
Fixthe
Fixthe
Fixthe
137
PRODUCT
EYEWEAR INDUSTRY
MATTRESS INDUSTRY
CAR INDUSTRY
MOVIE INDUSTRY
OIL INDUSTRY
LIQUOR INDUSTRY
O1
Fixthe
If something about your business model is unethical
(overly harmful to the world, or harmful to consumers by
way of marked-up legacy pricing schemes), then beware,
because Silicon Valley wants you gone. No amount
of feel-good commercials, branding or purposefully
obfuscated content plays can save you.
Glasses were marked up 500% Warby Parker
Forced individual ownership even though cars spend 90% of their lives idle Uber, Zipcar
Didn’t ever have sales Caskers, Lot18
The environment had to die for fuel Tesla battery
Marked them up 200 - 300% Casper
Placed pointless constraints around content availability Netflix
138
Silicon Valley has trained its entrepreneurs to hunt
these industries down, make replacement products
that are earnest and efficient, and then put the
dinosaurs out of business.
Here’s venture capitalist Paul Graham on hunting down the most
lucrative of the Fortune 500 dinosaurs:
“Find a cure for the disease of which things like
the RIAA is a symptom. Something is broken when
Sony and Universal sue children [over pirated
music]. Actually, at least two things are broken: the
software that file sharers use, and the record labels’
business model. When the dust settles in 20 years,
what will this world look like? What components of
it could you start building now?”
O1
139
Millennials are waiting for Silicon Valley to systematically reinvent every category
of business; in fact, they’ve come to expect nothing less. In mere months, old and
young Millennials have subverted decades and centuries-old businesses.
140
DISTRIBUTIONO2
Fixthe
The coming era of ‘Brand Tribes’: Affluent and less affluent Millennials alike won’t have to shop
in the future if they don’t want to because the machines will do it for them. Machines can even
take an individual’s ethics into account while they do it.
TODAY
Amazon Dash
TOMORROW
Jet.com
Just push a button you stick on your washing
machine and you’ve instantly ordered more Tide.
The purchase experience has been reduced to its
simplest act. An advertiser’s ability to influence it is
all but gone.
An Amazon competitor that will make bulk discount
deals on one specific product in a category. Imagine
an Amazon that only sells one kind of dishwashing
soap… But that dishwashing soap is half the price of
competitive soaps anywhere else.
141
And now, the Brand Tribe explains itself: Imagine
group-buying deals based on preferences. Never
think about what brand of soap, garbage bag or
spongemostrepresentsyou. Jetwillnotonlyfigure
it out, but broker a discount based on the ‘tribe’
you’re in. The cheap-o tribe? The environmental
tribe? The luxury tribe? Some blending of the
aforementioned?
You’ll be a member. Household purchases will
be entirely automated through sensors and then
filtered through your own preset preferences.
Uninteresting shopping experiences are relegated
to the background of life.
142
CRITICAL RECEPTIONO3
Fixthe
The way people find products they’ll like is
about to be completely overhauled. As one
harbinger of the future, look to The Wirecutter,
which combines the objectivity of Consumer
Reports’ reviews with the potency of big data.
The Wirecutter examined 15,000 data points
to make near-perfect recommendations on
things like ‘The best TV under $500’ and ‘The
best TV over $500.’
Early adopter Millennials already swear by the
service. Its best-reviewed products sell out
almost immediately on Best Buy and Amazon’s
websites.
The Coming Era of the ‘Perfect Product Review’
There are other related
players to watch:
143
PRODUCT HUNT
A new startup that allows people to
vote up or down on the hottest new
products, creating a crowdsourced
‘what’s hot’ list of things you can
shop for. Its vetting system can
make or break a startup overnight.
Product Hunt reduces the Gursky-
esque sea of goods that Americans
face and produces one simple,
short hotlist of what’s good.
This is what’s to come. Product Hunt lists the best
startups of the day
144
ENJOY
The flip side of the algorithmic
perfect review. Created by
the father of The Apple Store,
Enjoy only sells electronics
that its staff “uses and loves.”
The research phase of a big
electronics purchase, against
which the companies in play
spend millions, disappears.
Enjoy website
O3
145
GOOGLE NOW
As of June 2015, Google has
announced that its Now software
will instantly be able to assess
what product is right for you, based
off of what it knows about the rest
of your life (for example, I should
buy a small $19.95 composter
from Oxxo for my garden, because
it’s well-reviewed for use on
brightly lit, urban rooftop gardens,
whereas my mother needs an
entirely different model for her
backyard garden; plus she’s a
bargain-hunter and I’m not).
This type of Google research
will soon simplify: the next
Google Now could be capable
of figuring out that you’re in the
TV aisle at Best Buy, considering
a choice. Using all of your
personal data, plus Wirecutter’s
data, plus financial information
from your bank account, it will
automatically recommend which
of the 10,000 products would
really be right for you.
146
O3 The wonders of Google Now
147
It’s Not Remotely Egalitarian, Though:
The affluent will pay more for the
same goods and services than
the less affluent (which already
happens on sites like Amazon).
With more data, notions of “fairness”
in pricing models will change. As
mentioned,Amazonalreadycharges
its affluent customers extra money
for the very same good. (Their logic?
If they know you’ll pay $2 more
because you’re too lazy to price
check the good on a competitive
site, why not charge it?)
Airline companies also do the same
thing (boosting the price based on
how many times you’ve searched
the flight, aka quantifying how
much you desire to travel). Apple
has just patented technology that
allows them to know what amount
of credit is left on your credit lines,
so they can know what you could
afford to buy. Shopping will get even
more seamless and delightful, sure,
but with the current lack of privacy
regulation, there will be a dark side
to it, as well.
148
149
MILLENNIALS
CELEBRITY
AND
150
7NEW
FAMOUS
(ANONYMOUS)
IS THE
151
The ‘Normcore’ fashion trend
originates with urban, younger
Millennials, popularizing the wearing
of Walmart clothes as a sort of
reverse fashion statement. “For when
you realize you’re one in 7 billion”
was one of the movement’s better
taglines. These younger Millennials
have realized that feeling ‘special’ is
an artifice, created by marketing, and
a direct legacy of Edward Bernays.
Normcore: A fashion trend in which one wears
only commonplace items from stores like LL
Bean, Walmart, GAP and Old Navy. Also
sometimes referred to as ‘anti-fashion.’
152
Simultaneously, a new kind of ‘fame’ is evolving—
wherein well-known artists and personas
subvert their real identities, preferring the freedom
of true anonymity.
In our post-Warhol social media era, and in the
wordsofScottishartistMomus“Everyoneisfamous
to 15 people,” many subsets of Millennials are
interested in toying with the notions of invisibility,
identity and even infamy all at the same time.
We’ve already seen anonymity become a major
political tool (Arab Spring), but it’s now going
cultural, too. After all, Banksy—arguably the
world’s most sought-after living artist—has never
made his identity known to the public.
153
Amid the Millennial set, cult
personalities like @Seinfeld2000
use multiple medias to not only tell
jokes as an anonymous person,
but also to act as a meta-parody
of fictional characters like Jerry
Seinfeld.
An example of
@Seinfeld2000 in action:
154
@Seinfeld2000 also wrote a hugely popular novella about
President Barack Obama (which Warner Brothers attempted
unsuccessfully to ban, citing copyright infringement), of
which the opening lines, in their own invented, postmodern
language, are as follows:
“U.S. Presedent Barack
Sadam Husene Obame
sit in the darkened Oval
Ofice at 2 a.m. wearing hes
traditienel Kenyan robe.
He take one last bite of
the Chicago style deep
dish pizza that he has
flown to him every day on
the Amerecan tax payer’s
dime and wipe the grease
off his mouth with the U.S.
consititutien.
“Eeny, meeny, miney, mo —
which basic U.S. freedoms
are next to go?” he say
aloud to no one and every
one at the same time.
Then he flash that trade
mark Bary Obame million
doller grin as a crack of
lightning sound in the
distance.”
155
@SEINFELD2000 STAYS ANONYMOUS BECAUSE HE’S
NOT FINANCIALLY WELL-OFF ENOUGH TO REVEAL HIS
IDENTITY AND LOSE HIS JOB TO BECOME FAMOUS.
Despitemultiplepleasfromjournalists,theCanadianrefusestorevealanything
more about his identity other than the facts that he is male and Canadian, in
order to preserve the corporate life that makes him money.
Anonymity also has broad sweeping economic implications, as well. The
collective-turned-company HackerOne gained fame by hacking into 100 of the
biggest global companies’ mainframes, and emailing those companies with
the discovered security vulnerabilities. Originally seen as an out-of-control
vigilante effort, it didn’t take long for Hacker One to go legit, given how clever
the business idea was (we hack you for free, and then show you how we did it
for a fee). The company just raised a $25MM round of financing.
156
Modern economy flat-out encourages the bifurcation of identity. It’s
smart to maintain one job, try out a second job on the fly, and keep
a third in mind as a hobby. As previously discussed, this is a world
that heaps reward on fast-adapters, and Millennials’ future financial
survival will likely at some point be predicated on how quickly they
can assume a new personal and/or professional identity.
157
7
BLACK LIVES
MATTER
158
ACLARIONCALLFORACTION
Hip hop has continually introduced
artists who ignore the current
aesthetics of traditional celebrity, and
therefore notoriety. Kendrick Lamar,
D’Angelo, Kanye West, Common
and many others are engaged in
a dialogue about the state of race
relations in America that’s so eloquent
and important, their era of works
will inarguably go down in history
as one of music’s seminal periods.
Of Kendrick Lamar’s landmark new
album, To Pimp a Butterfly, The
Fader’s Rawiya Kameir said, “God
knows how long it will be before any of
us fully grasp the stacked meanings,
extended metaphors and shrouded
complexities of Kendrick Lamar’s To
Pimp A Butterfly. Definitely weeks,
probably months.”
“Ain’t nothin’ new but a flow of new Democrips
and Rebloodlicans Red state vs. a blue state
Which one are ya governin’?”
159
Seats on
an Airbus
A380
49 81 628 853
African-American Millennials face a
political system that has never produced
equal rights for all American citizens. To
paraphrase a recent speech by President
Obama, addressing matters of race is
about so much more than policing the
language we use, it’s about ensuring the
presence of equal opportunity.
NUMBER OF BLACK EMPLOYEES
AT LEADING TECH COMPANIES
160
Ta-Nehisi Coates’ luminous new book,
Between the World and Me, is a letter to
his Millennial-aged son. In it he discusses
America’s ceaseless history of violence on
African Americans, leaving them vulnerable
to arrest without cause, poverty, false
imprisonment and worse. He reminds us
that America is a nation built on stolen land,
through the tool of subjugation.
Toni Morrison calls the text “required
reading,” but her endorsement feels like an
understatement once one launches into the
first page, and then is sent reeling through
Mr. Coates’ depictions of his Baltimore
childhood, his education at Howard
University, his “mecca,” and the fear for his
body that consumes “30% of his brain” at
any given time during his adolescence.
“I have seen that dream all my life. It
is perfect houses with nice lawns. It is
Memorial Day cookouts, block associations,
and driveways. The Dream is treehouses
and the Cub Scouts. The Dream smells
like peppermint but tastes like strawberry
shortcake. And for so long I have wanted to
escape into the Dream, to fold my country
over my head like a blanket. But this has
never been an option because the Dream
rests on our backs, the bedding made from
our bodies.”
He speaks of The American Dream
as just that: a dream.
161
162
IT IS NOT ENOUGH TO CREATE A
SHARING ECONOMY TO SUSTAIN
OURSELVES IN THE FUTURE;
MILLENNIALS MUST TURN
THEIR ATTENTION TOWARD THE
POLICIES AND POLICING THAT
HAVE LEAD TO SUCH A REALITY.
163
164
7GENDER &
SEXUALITY
CHANGING IDEAS of
FOUCAULTFIELDDAY
165
To think, a mere five years ago, it was expected that at
some point every homosexual person was to “come out”
to the rest of society, because apparently society was
owed that explanation.
Now, younger Millennials have gloriously taken the identity
and sexuality privileges that Boomers and Gen Xers lost
their lives to fight for and are now happily running wild.
Without any grand, pained “coming out” explanations,
heroes like Miley Cyrus, J.Crew’s Jenna Lyons, Angelina
Jolie, Lady Gaga, Amber Heard, supermodel Cara
Delevingne freely, (sometimes occasionally, sometimes
steadily) date women. Matt Bomer, Billie Joe Armstrong,
Michael Chabon, date or marry men. It’s hard to name a star
who is an A-list force at the box office who’s not publicly
somewhere on the sexuality spectrum. Caitlyn Jenner
took the cover of Vanity Fair by storm. Perhaps no one
said it simpler or better than late night host Seth Meyers,
who put his jokes aside for a moment and commented
that he was so grateful to be “living in a time where we are
all so happy about Bruce going public as Caitlyn.”
Fashion doesn’t get any more
beautiful than 2015
166
IN THEIR FUTURE, THE
FLUIDITY WILL ONLY FURTHER
NORMALIZE AND INCREASE.
In the instances of gender and sexuality, the
older Millennials are truly learning from the
younger ones, many of whom have shed
their pretense. Perhaps the first subset of a
generation to grow up with ‘out’ pop stars and
movie stars of all varieties, younger Millennials
have no reflexive memory of unflinching
culture fear and disdain for being not-straight.
Ever since Lady Gaga roared that she was “Born
This Way” and Google placed her atop the
Brooklyn Bridge, younger Millennials have not
looked back And how lucky we all are, for that.
167
7
MILLENNIALS, AGING,
QUESTION
TIME
of
and the
168
“These joys were so trifling as to be as
imperceptible as grains of gold among the
sand, and in moments of depression she
saw nothing but the sand; yet there were
brighter moments when she felt nothing
but joy, saw nothing but the gold.”
- Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina
“Our ancestors learned how to remember,
and we will learn how to forget.”
- Clive Thompson, Smarter Than You Think, 2013
“Time is an illusion.”
- Albert Einstein
169
With special, heightened
consideration given to the
younger Millennials, cohorts
of this generation will have
relationships with time that
are different to any humans
who’ve come before them.
170
With videography and photography made casual
and archivable by the smartphone, we have now
becomeanationofarchivists.YoungerMillennials
will have the very best records of their online lives,
given the number of life-chronicling tools that have
emerged in the last five years, and will continue
to emerge in the next. We will now bequeath our
descendants ever-improving digital time capsules
of our lives. Last year, T.C. Boyle wrote a story for
The New Yorker called “The Relive Box,” in which
a widowed man and his young girl slowly become
addicted to using their Halcom X1520 Relive Box
to relive their favorite memories of life with their
now-deceased mom. “[My daughter] was going
to bed, and I was going back to a rainy February
night in 1982, a sold-out show at the Roxy,” the
father says. The bittersweet story could not be a
more accurate prediction of the near future.
For the time being, we have our primitive time-
traveling tools: our Stone Age-era Timehop apps
(search your Facebook and Instagram photos
from this date, last year, 2 years and 3 years+ ago);
our data-gathering, preference-learning devices
(Google Now knowing that you love gourmet ice
cream and making a recommendation on a trip);
the letter-writing site future.me, on which one can
write an email to their future selves or a loved one.
171
Some of the most trivial-seeming mobile apps
built by Millennials are actually reimagining the
way we think about the self over time. Snapchat
figured something out that had previously
eclipsed the greatest minds in social media:
people don’t always want to see themselves in the
future. Sometimes people actually like to forget.
Maybe we’ll someday come to regret letting all of
Snapchat’s disappearing images disappear, but
for the time being, the app is serving a vital need
Millennials (especially younger Millennials, the
more determined life-loggers) have: to live certain
moments without the onus of memory.
172
This agita over our own image is nothing new;
the act of staring at ourselves has been altering
human consciousness for thousands of years. In
the 1400s, the invention of the Murano glass mirror
was actually a crucial enabler of the Renaissance.
As Steven Johnson wrote in his wonderful book
How We Got To Now:
“[Glass mirrors] set in motion a reorientation of
society. […] Social conventions as well as property
rights and other legal customs began to revolve
around the individual rather than the older, more
collective units: the family, the tribe, the city, the
kingdom. People began writing about their interior
lives with far more scrutiny. Hamlet ruminated
onstage, the novel emerged as a dominant form
of storytelling, probing the inner mental lives of its
characters with an unrivaled depth.
Entering a novel, particularly a first-person
narrative, was a kind of collective parlor trick:
it let you swim through consciousness. […] The
psychological novel, in a sense, is the kind of story
you start wanting to hear once you begin spending
meaningful hours of your life staring at yourself in
a mirror.”
Snapchat is a meaningful invention because it’s
tethering identity to the opposite of a mirror. It’s
the first picture or video-based mass social media
tool that’s not so overtly, gratuitously about the
self—it’s about other people. We send Snapchats
to share a sincere happening, to react, to make
someone else feel loved, to make someone else
laugh. We think primarily about the other, not
about the self, precisely because the medium
doesn’t lend itself well to self-congratulation.
173
As Millennials young and old, rich and
poor imbue their lives with a greater
awareness of community’s importance,
of living on less, of detaching their self
worth from the constraints of a job at
a major corporation, it’s only natural
that they will completely reconsider not
only what the individual is, but how the
individual behaves and is remembered.
174
7AUGMENTING
REALITYOUR
175
Oculus Rift, perhaps a predecessor to T.C.
Boyle’s invented “Halcom X1520 Relive Box,”
is about to unleash its powers on the world
sometime next year. Interestingly, Facebook
competitor Google has begun thinking more
democratically about what AR technology
could do for the planet by way of its highly
affordable AR-riff, Google Cardboard. By
using nothing more than cardboard to give
any smartphone transformative, reality-
augmenting powers, Google has now created
a series of educational ‘tours’ called Google
Field Trips, intended to allow students to
explore the sites and sights they’re studying
in history.
176
In James Gleick’s seminal 2011 book, The Information, he
investigates the work of Dr. Elizabeth Eisenstein, one of the
most futuristic thinkers about time and reality in the 1960s
(she was an avid follow of Marshall McLuhan, of course).
Dr. Eisenstein concluded that “The past is becoming more
accessible, more visible” than it had ever been. As we
prepare for augmented reality to begin its trickle-down
journey into every home in America, her words could not
have been more accurate. Imagine the best, most high
definition TV or movie screen you’ve come across, pair it with
the best surround sound, and imagine that setup enabling
the Millennials of the future to relive the day they adopted
their son—with him, now an adolescent, in the room. This
is their future. Now amplify that future with smell. Dead
Man’s Eyes, a prototype developed by Dr. Stuart Eve, allows
archaeologists to add smell to their augmented reality film
of the past.
177
“During the Bronze Age the site on Bodmin
Moor was a tin-mining village. When Dr Eve
held the camera up to the hill (left) a series
of huts appeared to make it look like he was
exploring the ancient village (right). These
reconstructions move and change in real-
time as the user moves around the terrain.”
178
THINK
MILLENNNIALS’
CHILDREN &
GRANDCHILDREN
WILL COMPLAIN
ABOUT HISTORY
HOMEWORK?
179
The individual, the very story America was predicated on, is
shrinking in importance in the eyes of many Millennials. The
sharing economy predicates telling a story that’s much more
interesting about a collective of people, not an individual person.
Television has gone longform, often to explore a myriad of
characters who, like Tolstoy’s characters from his masterpiece
Anna Karenina, are each a different person in the eyes of every
person they meet.
Think then of The Sopranos, or of True Detective’s Detective
Rustin “Rust” Cohle viewed through the eyes of his partner,
Detective Martin Hart, versus how Hart’s wife Maggie viewed
him. The stories older and younger Millennials are gravitating
toward are lusciously complicated mosaics, not linear stories
of individual triumph. Oftentimes the three act structure is
completely abandoned; after two thousand years of success,
it no longer seems suited to our time.
180
ONCLUCONCLUSION
181
USION
And so we will emerge to find ourselves living in an era of
digital hippies. Millennials will live, work and thrive in tight-knit
communities, untethered from the draconian constraints of a
9-to-5, learning to live on less. The prices of things, Millennials
have discovered, are entirely arbitrary. A mortgage doesn’t
have to cost $200,000 because Toll Brothers said it should. A
home can be built for a quarter of that, and without a long term
mortgage. Land can be shared, and isolation avoided. Services
can be traded and summer homes can be small communes,
with 500 square foot treehouses sequestered around a
small pond. Work can be freelance, and span a multitude of
industries that ebb and flow, given the year. Craftsmanship
can be valued, even deified. School can be of the trade variety,
a random and lifelong experience, and not something we heap
upon the ungrateful like a 4-year-long quinceanera. Nature
can be embraced, not ignored. Love can be love: gay, straight
or whatever. Labels can be left to history’s annals. Black lives
can be examined and re-imagined, until we no longer have to
gather in the streets and cry out that they matter.
182
183
A farcical equality for some or a noble equality
for all—that is our generation’s choice. We
should not allow the world to come to rest in
its current socioeconomic state, wherein, in
the words of the Nobel laureate economist
Joseph Stiglitz, “A rising tide lifts all yachts.”
That is not acceptable.
The old American Dream, too often deferred
to deserve the privilege of reference, may
be dead in its current states, but it will
leave behind something better. Something
achievable. Something magical. Something
worthy of the word Millennial.
184
185
States of the American Millennial

Contenu connexe

Tendances

Union of Humans: The Future of the Millennial Generation in the Age of Automa...
Union of Humans: The Future of the Millennial Generation in the Age of Automa...Union of Humans: The Future of the Millennial Generation in the Age of Automa...
Union of Humans: The Future of the Millennial Generation in the Age of Automa...Ogilvy
 
Trends with Tension 2017
Trends with Tension 2017 Trends with Tension 2017
Trends with Tension 2017 Young & Rubicam
 
How Automation Has Affected Our Lives Today
How Automation Has Affected Our Lives Today How Automation Has Affected Our Lives Today
How Automation Has Affected Our Lives Today Chris Sharanewych
 
A Marketer's Guide to Millenials
A Marketer's Guide to MillenialsA Marketer's Guide to Millenials
A Marketer's Guide to MillenialsFresh Digital Group
 
Social@Ogilvy on Millennials, the New Age Heroes
Social@Ogilvy on Millennials, the New Age HeroesSocial@Ogilvy on Millennials, the New Age Heroes
Social@Ogilvy on Millennials, the New Age HeroesOgilvy Consulting
 
Social Media in the Enterprise: Information Management Challenge
Social Media in the Enterprise: Information Management ChallengeSocial Media in the Enterprise: Information Management Challenge
Social Media in the Enterprise: Information Management ChallengeLisa Chow
 
Government For The People, By The People, In the 21st Century
Government For The People, By The People, In the 21st CenturyGovernment For The People, By The People, In the 21st Century
Government For The People, By The People, In the 21st CenturyTim O'Reilly
 
Celebrity 2.0: New New Hollywood is Breaking All The Rules
Celebrity 2.0: New New Hollywood is Breaking All The RulesCelebrity 2.0: New New Hollywood is Breaking All The Rules
Celebrity 2.0: New New Hollywood is Breaking All The Rulessparks & honey
 
2018 looking further with_ford_trend report_
2018 looking further with_ford_trend report_2018 looking further with_ford_trend report_
2018 looking further with_ford_trend report_Marketing Media Review
 
Trends with Tension 2016: North America
Trends with Tension 2016: North AmericaTrends with Tension 2016: North America
Trends with Tension 2016: North AmericaYoung & Rubicam
 
Newspapers are Old News
Newspapers are Old NewsNewspapers are Old News
Newspapers are Old NewsKristin Hudon
 
Mindshare@SXSWi 2016: The Takeaways for Marketers
Mindshare@SXSWi 2016: The Takeaways for MarketersMindshare@SXSWi 2016: The Takeaways for Marketers
Mindshare@SXSWi 2016: The Takeaways for MarketersMindshare North America
 
MRY's SXSW 2015 Recap: Brands, Tech, Meerkat, Trends, and Meerkat
MRY's SXSW 2015 Recap: Brands, Tech, Meerkat, Trends, and MeerkatMRY's SXSW 2015 Recap: Brands, Tech, Meerkat, Trends, and Meerkat
MRY's SXSW 2015 Recap: Brands, Tech, Meerkat, Trends, and MeerkatDavid Berkowitz
 
Everything You Wanted to Know about Social Media - July 2009
Everything You Wanted to Know about Social Media - July 2009Everything You Wanted to Know about Social Media - July 2009
Everything You Wanted to Know about Social Media - July 2009Walter Jennings
 
The Great Divide
The Great DivideThe Great Divide
The Great Dividelazinam9
 

Tendances (20)

Union of Humans: The Future of the Millennial Generation in the Age of Automa...
Union of Humans: The Future of the Millennial Generation in the Age of Automa...Union of Humans: The Future of the Millennial Generation in the Age of Automa...
Union of Humans: The Future of the Millennial Generation in the Age of Automa...
 
The State of the Union: Highlights
The State of the Union: HighlightsThe State of the Union: Highlights
The State of the Union: Highlights
 
Trends with Tension 2017
Trends with Tension 2017 Trends with Tension 2017
Trends with Tension 2017
 
How Automation Has Affected Our Lives Today
How Automation Has Affected Our Lives Today How Automation Has Affected Our Lives Today
How Automation Has Affected Our Lives Today
 
Selling Social Media to the CEO
Selling Social Media to the CEOSelling Social Media to the CEO
Selling Social Media to the CEO
 
Culture Vulture Trends Report: 2018
Culture Vulture Trends Report: 2018Culture Vulture Trends Report: 2018
Culture Vulture Trends Report: 2018
 
A Marketer's Guide to Millenials
A Marketer's Guide to MillenialsA Marketer's Guide to Millenials
A Marketer's Guide to Millenials
 
Social@Ogilvy on Millennials, the New Age Heroes
Social@Ogilvy on Millennials, the New Age HeroesSocial@Ogilvy on Millennials, the New Age Heroes
Social@Ogilvy on Millennials, the New Age Heroes
 
Social Media in the Enterprise: Information Management Challenge
Social Media in the Enterprise: Information Management ChallengeSocial Media in the Enterprise: Information Management Challenge
Social Media in the Enterprise: Information Management Challenge
 
Government For The People, By The People, In the 21st Century
Government For The People, By The People, In the 21st CenturyGovernment For The People, By The People, In the 21st Century
Government For The People, By The People, In the 21st Century
 
Celebrity 2.0: New New Hollywood is Breaking All The Rules
Celebrity 2.0: New New Hollywood is Breaking All The RulesCelebrity 2.0: New New Hollywood is Breaking All The Rules
Celebrity 2.0: New New Hollywood is Breaking All The Rules
 
Future 100 2018
Future 100 2018Future 100 2018
Future 100 2018
 
2018 looking further with_ford_trend report_
2018 looking further with_ford_trend report_2018 looking further with_ford_trend report_
2018 looking further with_ford_trend report_
 
Trends with Tension
Trends with TensionTrends with Tension
Trends with Tension
 
Trends with Tension 2016: North America
Trends with Tension 2016: North AmericaTrends with Tension 2016: North America
Trends with Tension 2016: North America
 
Newspapers are Old News
Newspapers are Old NewsNewspapers are Old News
Newspapers are Old News
 
Mindshare@SXSWi 2016: The Takeaways for Marketers
Mindshare@SXSWi 2016: The Takeaways for MarketersMindshare@SXSWi 2016: The Takeaways for Marketers
Mindshare@SXSWi 2016: The Takeaways for Marketers
 
MRY's SXSW 2015 Recap: Brands, Tech, Meerkat, Trends, and Meerkat
MRY's SXSW 2015 Recap: Brands, Tech, Meerkat, Trends, and MeerkatMRY's SXSW 2015 Recap: Brands, Tech, Meerkat, Trends, and Meerkat
MRY's SXSW 2015 Recap: Brands, Tech, Meerkat, Trends, and Meerkat
 
Everything You Wanted to Know about Social Media - July 2009
Everything You Wanted to Know about Social Media - July 2009Everything You Wanted to Know about Social Media - July 2009
Everything You Wanted to Know about Social Media - July 2009
 
The Great Divide
The Great DivideThe Great Divide
The Great Divide
 

En vedette

OgilvyRED - Dollars and Sense of Connectivity
OgilvyRED - Dollars and Sense of ConnectivityOgilvyRED - Dollars and Sense of Connectivity
OgilvyRED - Dollars and Sense of ConnectivityOgilvy
 
Vertical Video POV
Vertical Video POVVertical Video POV
Vertical Video POVOgilvy
 
Ogilvy & Mather Cannes Lions 2015 Digital Performance
Ogilvy & Mather Cannes Lions 2015 Digital PerformanceOgilvy & Mather Cannes Lions 2015 Digital Performance
Ogilvy & Mather Cannes Lions 2015 Digital PerformanceOgilvy
 
The Digital Social Contract
The Digital Social Contract The Digital Social Contract
The Digital Social Contract Ogilvy
 
Brands That Do: Building Behavior Brands
Brands That Do: Building Behavior BrandsBrands That Do: Building Behavior Brands
Brands That Do: Building Behavior BrandsOgilvy
 
2015 International CES Day 3 Recap #OgilvyCES
2015 International CES Day 3 Recap #OgilvyCES2015 International CES Day 3 Recap #OgilvyCES
2015 International CES Day 3 Recap #OgilvyCESOgilvy
 
How To Cultivate Brand Advocacy
How To Cultivate Brand AdvocacyHow To Cultivate Brand Advocacy
How To Cultivate Brand AdvocacyOgilvy Consulting
 
How to Fuel Your Brand by Wendy Clark @Wnd #OgilvyCannes #CannesLions
How to Fuel Your Brand by Wendy Clark @Wnd #OgilvyCannes #CannesLions How to Fuel Your Brand by Wendy Clark @Wnd #OgilvyCannes #CannesLions
How to Fuel Your Brand by Wendy Clark @Wnd #OgilvyCannes #CannesLions Ogilvy
 
2015 International CES Day 2 Recap #OgilvyCES
2015 International CES Day 2 Recap #OgilvyCES 2015 International CES Day 2 Recap #OgilvyCES
2015 International CES Day 2 Recap #OgilvyCES Ogilvy
 
Mobile World Congress 2017 Highlights
Mobile World Congress 2017 HighlightsMobile World Congress 2017 Highlights
Mobile World Congress 2017 HighlightsOgilvy Consulting
 
Don't be a Zombie Brand #OgilvyCannes #CannesLions
Don't be a Zombie Brand #OgilvyCannes #CannesLions Don't be a Zombie Brand #OgilvyCannes #CannesLions
Don't be a Zombie Brand #OgilvyCannes #CannesLions Ogilvy
 
10 Pearls of Wisdom for Working With & Leading People
10 Pearls of Wisdom for Working With & Leading People10 Pearls of Wisdom for Working With & Leading People
10 Pearls of Wisdom for Working With & Leading PeopleOgilvy
 
Socialize the Enterprise
Socialize the EnterpriseSocialize the Enterprise
Socialize the EnterpriseOgilvy
 
How Does an Ad Man Inspire a Revolution #OgilvyCannes #CannesLions
How Does an Ad Man Inspire a Revolution #OgilvyCannes #CannesLionsHow Does an Ad Man Inspire a Revolution #OgilvyCannes #CannesLions
How Does an Ad Man Inspire a Revolution #OgilvyCannes #CannesLionsOgilvy
 
Learning to Read the River
Learning to Read the River Learning to Read the River
Learning to Read the River Ogilvy
 
Mainstream Green
Mainstream GreenMainstream Green
Mainstream GreenOgilvy
 
Marilyn Manson's Masterclass in Marketing
Marilyn Manson's Masterclass in Marketing Marilyn Manson's Masterclass in Marketing
Marilyn Manson's Masterclass in Marketing Ogilvy
 

En vedette (20)

OgilvyRED - Dollars and Sense of Connectivity
OgilvyRED - Dollars and Sense of ConnectivityOgilvyRED - Dollars and Sense of Connectivity
OgilvyRED - Dollars and Sense of Connectivity
 
Vertical Video POV
Vertical Video POVVertical Video POV
Vertical Video POV
 
Ogilvy & Mather Cannes Lions 2015 Digital Performance
Ogilvy & Mather Cannes Lions 2015 Digital PerformanceOgilvy & Mather Cannes Lions 2015 Digital Performance
Ogilvy & Mather Cannes Lions 2015 Digital Performance
 
The Digital Social Contract
The Digital Social Contract The Digital Social Contract
The Digital Social Contract
 
Brands That Do: Building Behavior Brands
Brands That Do: Building Behavior BrandsBrands That Do: Building Behavior Brands
Brands That Do: Building Behavior Brands
 
Key Digital Trends for 2017
Key Digital Trends for 2017Key Digital Trends for 2017
Key Digital Trends for 2017
 
2015 International CES Day 3 Recap #OgilvyCES
2015 International CES Day 3 Recap #OgilvyCES2015 International CES Day 3 Recap #OgilvyCES
2015 International CES Day 3 Recap #OgilvyCES
 
How To Cultivate Brand Advocacy
How To Cultivate Brand AdvocacyHow To Cultivate Brand Advocacy
How To Cultivate Brand Advocacy
 
Understanding Blockchain
Understanding BlockchainUnderstanding Blockchain
Understanding Blockchain
 
How to Fuel Your Brand by Wendy Clark @Wnd #OgilvyCannes #CannesLions
How to Fuel Your Brand by Wendy Clark @Wnd #OgilvyCannes #CannesLions How to Fuel Your Brand by Wendy Clark @Wnd #OgilvyCannes #CannesLions
How to Fuel Your Brand by Wendy Clark @Wnd #OgilvyCannes #CannesLions
 
2015 International CES Day 2 Recap #OgilvyCES
2015 International CES Day 2 Recap #OgilvyCES 2015 International CES Day 2 Recap #OgilvyCES
2015 International CES Day 2 Recap #OgilvyCES
 
Mobile World Congress 2017 Highlights
Mobile World Congress 2017 HighlightsMobile World Congress 2017 Highlights
Mobile World Congress 2017 Highlights
 
Don't be a Zombie Brand #OgilvyCannes #CannesLions
Don't be a Zombie Brand #OgilvyCannes #CannesLions Don't be a Zombie Brand #OgilvyCannes #CannesLions
Don't be a Zombie Brand #OgilvyCannes #CannesLions
 
Point of Care Messaging
Point of Care MessagingPoint of Care Messaging
Point of Care Messaging
 
10 Pearls of Wisdom for Working With & Leading People
10 Pearls of Wisdom for Working With & Leading People10 Pearls of Wisdom for Working With & Leading People
10 Pearls of Wisdom for Working With & Leading People
 
Socialize the Enterprise
Socialize the EnterpriseSocialize the Enterprise
Socialize the Enterprise
 
How Does an Ad Man Inspire a Revolution #OgilvyCannes #CannesLions
How Does an Ad Man Inspire a Revolution #OgilvyCannes #CannesLionsHow Does an Ad Man Inspire a Revolution #OgilvyCannes #CannesLions
How Does an Ad Man Inspire a Revolution #OgilvyCannes #CannesLions
 
Learning to Read the River
Learning to Read the River Learning to Read the River
Learning to Read the River
 
Mainstream Green
Mainstream GreenMainstream Green
Mainstream Green
 
Marilyn Manson's Masterclass in Marketing
Marilyn Manson's Masterclass in Marketing Marilyn Manson's Masterclass in Marketing
Marilyn Manson's Masterclass in Marketing
 

Similaire à States of the American Millennial

Millenial Market Alignment Report_LinkedIn
Millenial Market Alignment Report_LinkedInMillenial Market Alignment Report_LinkedIn
Millenial Market Alignment Report_LinkedInCyreeta Sharp
 
The Importance Of The Social Construction Of Childhood
The Importance Of The Social Construction Of ChildhoodThe Importance Of The Social Construction Of Childhood
The Importance Of The Social Construction Of ChildhoodJessica Rinehart
 
Millennials and the Future of Corporate America
Millennials and the Future of Corporate AmericaMillennials and the Future of Corporate America
Millennials and the Future of Corporate AmericaSteven Reta
 
Social media wtf. New Media
Social media wtf. New MediaSocial media wtf. New Media
Social media wtf. New MediaMarco Gorini
 
Elementary School Mobility
Elementary School MobilityElementary School Mobility
Elementary School MobilityAlyssa Jones
 
The Millennial Perspective-IssueBrief
The Millennial Perspective-IssueBriefThe Millennial Perspective-IssueBrief
The Millennial Perspective-IssueBriefCourtney Hull
 
Teh Millennials Part II
Teh Millennials Part IITeh Millennials Part II
Teh Millennials Part IICampbell-Ewald
 
Trends Consumers and Brands 2024 - By Juan Isaza
Trends Consumers and Brands 2024 - By Juan IsazaTrends Consumers and Brands 2024 - By Juan Isaza
Trends Consumers and Brands 2024 - By Juan IsazaDDB Latina
 
Millennials and Social Media
Millennials and Social MediaMillennials and Social Media
Millennials and Social MediaHavasPR
 
Millennials Stereotypes
Millennials StereotypesMillennials Stereotypes
Millennials StereotypesMichelle Adams
 
Trends 2016 | Juan Isaza | The Insight Point
Trends 2016 | Juan Isaza | The Insight PointTrends 2016 | Juan Isaza | The Insight Point
Trends 2016 | Juan Isaza | The Insight PointDDB Latina
 
What is Social Media?
What is Social Media?What is Social Media?
What is Social Media?Nathan Roth
 
What is social media NOW?
What is social media NOW?What is social media NOW?
What is social media NOW?Martafy!
 
The Importance Of Respect In Society Today
The Importance Of Respect In Society TodayThe Importance Of Respect In Society Today
The Importance Of Respect In Society TodayBrittany Eason
 
Trends for 2010
Trends for 2010Trends for 2010
Trends for 2010Havas PR
 

Similaire à States of the American Millennial (20)

Millenial Market Alignment Report_LinkedIn
Millenial Market Alignment Report_LinkedInMillenial Market Alignment Report_LinkedIn
Millenial Market Alignment Report_LinkedIn
 
The Importance Of The Social Construction Of Childhood
The Importance Of The Social Construction Of ChildhoodThe Importance Of The Social Construction Of Childhood
The Importance Of The Social Construction Of Childhood
 
Millennials and the Future of Corporate America
Millennials and the Future of Corporate AmericaMillennials and the Future of Corporate America
Millennials and the Future of Corporate America
 
Social media wtf. New Media
Social media wtf. New MediaSocial media wtf. New Media
Social media wtf. New Media
 
Trends 2017
Trends 2017 Trends 2017
Trends 2017
 
Elementary School Mobility
Elementary School MobilityElementary School Mobility
Elementary School Mobility
 
The Millennial Perspective-IssueBrief
The Millennial Perspective-IssueBriefThe Millennial Perspective-IssueBrief
The Millennial Perspective-IssueBrief
 
Teh Millennials Part II
Teh Millennials Part IITeh Millennials Part II
Teh Millennials Part II
 
Trends Consumers and Brands 2024 - By Juan Isaza
Trends Consumers and Brands 2024 - By Juan IsazaTrends Consumers and Brands 2024 - By Juan Isaza
Trends Consumers and Brands 2024 - By Juan Isaza
 
Millennials and Social Media
Millennials and Social MediaMillennials and Social Media
Millennials and Social Media
 
Baby Boomer Culture
Baby Boomer CultureBaby Boomer Culture
Baby Boomer Culture
 
Millennials Stereotypes
Millennials StereotypesMillennials Stereotypes
Millennials Stereotypes
 
Media And The Media
Media And The MediaMedia And The Media
Media And The Media
 
How Does The Media Influence Deviance
How Does The Media Influence DevianceHow Does The Media Influence Deviance
How Does The Media Influence Deviance
 
Trends 2016 | Juan Isaza | The Insight Point
Trends 2016 | Juan Isaza | The Insight PointTrends 2016 | Juan Isaza | The Insight Point
Trends 2016 | Juan Isaza | The Insight Point
 
What is Social Media?
What is Social Media?What is Social Media?
What is Social Media?
 
What is social media NOW?
What is social media NOW?What is social media NOW?
What is social media NOW?
 
The Importance Of Respect In Society Today
The Importance Of Respect In Society TodayThe Importance Of Respect In Society Today
The Importance Of Respect In Society Today
 
What is social media NOW?
What is social media NOW?What is social media NOW?
What is social media NOW?
 
Trends for 2010
Trends for 2010Trends for 2010
Trends for 2010
 

Plus de Ogilvy

7 Lessons from Established Online Video Viewers
7 Lessons from Established Online Video Viewers 7 Lessons from Established Online Video Viewers
7 Lessons from Established Online Video Viewers Ogilvy
 
Point of View on Cambridge Analytica Scandal
Point of View on Cambridge Analytica Scandal Point of View on Cambridge Analytica Scandal
Point of View on Cambridge Analytica Scandal Ogilvy
 
Surf Your Way To Success in E-Commerce
Surf Your Way To Success in E-Commerce Surf Your Way To Success in E-Commerce
Surf Your Way To Success in E-Commerce Ogilvy
 
2018 Prognostications For The Year Of The Dog
2018 Prognostications For The Year Of The Dog2018 Prognostications For The Year Of The Dog
2018 Prognostications For The Year Of The DogOgilvy
 
How to Create Social Content that Sells
How to Create Social Content that SellsHow to Create Social Content that Sells
How to Create Social Content that SellsOgilvy
 
The Wellness Movement Pioneers
The Wellness Movement PioneersThe Wellness Movement Pioneers
The Wellness Movement PioneersOgilvy
 
5 Ways Winning Young Lions Changed My Career - #CannesLions #OgilvyCannes
5 Ways Winning Young Lions Changed My Career - #CannesLions #OgilvyCannes5 Ways Winning Young Lions Changed My Career - #CannesLions #OgilvyCannes
5 Ways Winning Young Lions Changed My Career - #CannesLions #OgilvyCannesOgilvy
 
How to Launch New Products by #DavidOgilvy
How to Launch New Products by #DavidOgilvyHow to Launch New Products by #DavidOgilvy
How to Launch New Products by #DavidOgilvyOgilvy
 
For Goodness’ Sake: Satisfy the hunger for meaningful business
 For Goodness’ Sake: Satisfy the hunger for meaningful business  For Goodness’ Sake: Satisfy the hunger for meaningful business
For Goodness’ Sake: Satisfy the hunger for meaningful business Ogilvy
 
Day 4 Recap from #CannesLions #OgilvyCannes
Day 4 Recap from #CannesLions #OgilvyCannes Day 4 Recap from #CannesLions #OgilvyCannes
Day 4 Recap from #CannesLions #OgilvyCannes Ogilvy
 
Day 3 Recap for #CannesLions #OgilvyCannes
Day 3 Recap for #CannesLions #OgilvyCannesDay 3 Recap for #CannesLions #OgilvyCannes
Day 3 Recap for #CannesLions #OgilvyCannesOgilvy
 
Day 2 Recap from #CannesLions #OgilvyCannes
Day 2 Recap from #CannesLions #OgilvyCannes Day 2 Recap from #CannesLions #OgilvyCannes
Day 2 Recap from #CannesLions #OgilvyCannes Ogilvy
 
Looking for Love in All the Right Places #OgilvyCannes #CannesLions
Looking for Love in All the Right Places #OgilvyCannes #CannesLionsLooking for Love in All the Right Places #OgilvyCannes #CannesLions
Looking for Love in All the Right Places #OgilvyCannes #CannesLionsOgilvy
 
3 Keys to Creating a Lasting Impression #OgilvyCannes #CannesLions
3 Keys to Creating a Lasting Impression #OgilvyCannes #CannesLions3 Keys to Creating a Lasting Impression #OgilvyCannes #CannesLions
3 Keys to Creating a Lasting Impression #OgilvyCannes #CannesLionsOgilvy
 
Day 1 Recap from #CannesLions #OgilvyCannes
Day 1 Recap from #CannesLions #OgilvyCannes Day 1 Recap from #CannesLions #OgilvyCannes
Day 1 Recap from #CannesLions #OgilvyCannes Ogilvy
 
Looking at Ogilvy & Mather in a Different Light
Looking at Ogilvy & Mather in a Different LightLooking at Ogilvy & Mather in a Different Light
Looking at Ogilvy & Mather in a Different LightOgilvy
 
5 Takeaways from South by Southwest
5 Takeaways from South by Southwest5 Takeaways from South by Southwest
5 Takeaways from South by SouthwestOgilvy
 
Mobile World Congress 2015: Full Recap
Mobile World Congress 2015: Full RecapMobile World Congress 2015: Full Recap
Mobile World Congress 2015: Full RecapOgilvy
 
Mobile World Congress - Day 4 Recap
Mobile World Congress - Day 4 Recap Mobile World Congress - Day 4 Recap
Mobile World Congress - Day 4 Recap Ogilvy
 

Plus de Ogilvy (19)

7 Lessons from Established Online Video Viewers
7 Lessons from Established Online Video Viewers 7 Lessons from Established Online Video Viewers
7 Lessons from Established Online Video Viewers
 
Point of View on Cambridge Analytica Scandal
Point of View on Cambridge Analytica Scandal Point of View on Cambridge Analytica Scandal
Point of View on Cambridge Analytica Scandal
 
Surf Your Way To Success in E-Commerce
Surf Your Way To Success in E-Commerce Surf Your Way To Success in E-Commerce
Surf Your Way To Success in E-Commerce
 
2018 Prognostications For The Year Of The Dog
2018 Prognostications For The Year Of The Dog2018 Prognostications For The Year Of The Dog
2018 Prognostications For The Year Of The Dog
 
How to Create Social Content that Sells
How to Create Social Content that SellsHow to Create Social Content that Sells
How to Create Social Content that Sells
 
The Wellness Movement Pioneers
The Wellness Movement PioneersThe Wellness Movement Pioneers
The Wellness Movement Pioneers
 
5 Ways Winning Young Lions Changed My Career - #CannesLions #OgilvyCannes
5 Ways Winning Young Lions Changed My Career - #CannesLions #OgilvyCannes5 Ways Winning Young Lions Changed My Career - #CannesLions #OgilvyCannes
5 Ways Winning Young Lions Changed My Career - #CannesLions #OgilvyCannes
 
How to Launch New Products by #DavidOgilvy
How to Launch New Products by #DavidOgilvyHow to Launch New Products by #DavidOgilvy
How to Launch New Products by #DavidOgilvy
 
For Goodness’ Sake: Satisfy the hunger for meaningful business
 For Goodness’ Sake: Satisfy the hunger for meaningful business  For Goodness’ Sake: Satisfy the hunger for meaningful business
For Goodness’ Sake: Satisfy the hunger for meaningful business
 
Day 4 Recap from #CannesLions #OgilvyCannes
Day 4 Recap from #CannesLions #OgilvyCannes Day 4 Recap from #CannesLions #OgilvyCannes
Day 4 Recap from #CannesLions #OgilvyCannes
 
Day 3 Recap for #CannesLions #OgilvyCannes
Day 3 Recap for #CannesLions #OgilvyCannesDay 3 Recap for #CannesLions #OgilvyCannes
Day 3 Recap for #CannesLions #OgilvyCannes
 
Day 2 Recap from #CannesLions #OgilvyCannes
Day 2 Recap from #CannesLions #OgilvyCannes Day 2 Recap from #CannesLions #OgilvyCannes
Day 2 Recap from #CannesLions #OgilvyCannes
 
Looking for Love in All the Right Places #OgilvyCannes #CannesLions
Looking for Love in All the Right Places #OgilvyCannes #CannesLionsLooking for Love in All the Right Places #OgilvyCannes #CannesLions
Looking for Love in All the Right Places #OgilvyCannes #CannesLions
 
3 Keys to Creating a Lasting Impression #OgilvyCannes #CannesLions
3 Keys to Creating a Lasting Impression #OgilvyCannes #CannesLions3 Keys to Creating a Lasting Impression #OgilvyCannes #CannesLions
3 Keys to Creating a Lasting Impression #OgilvyCannes #CannesLions
 
Day 1 Recap from #CannesLions #OgilvyCannes
Day 1 Recap from #CannesLions #OgilvyCannes Day 1 Recap from #CannesLions #OgilvyCannes
Day 1 Recap from #CannesLions #OgilvyCannes
 
Looking at Ogilvy & Mather in a Different Light
Looking at Ogilvy & Mather in a Different LightLooking at Ogilvy & Mather in a Different Light
Looking at Ogilvy & Mather in a Different Light
 
5 Takeaways from South by Southwest
5 Takeaways from South by Southwest5 Takeaways from South by Southwest
5 Takeaways from South by Southwest
 
Mobile World Congress 2015: Full Recap
Mobile World Congress 2015: Full RecapMobile World Congress 2015: Full Recap
Mobile World Congress 2015: Full Recap
 
Mobile World Congress - Day 4 Recap
Mobile World Congress - Day 4 Recap Mobile World Congress - Day 4 Recap
Mobile World Congress - Day 4 Recap
 

Dernier

Elevate Your Design Skills: Enroll in Pune's Premier UI/UX Design Course
Elevate Your Design Skills: Enroll in Pune's Premier UI/UX Design CourseElevate Your Design Skills: Enroll in Pune's Premier UI/UX Design Course
Elevate Your Design Skills: Enroll in Pune's Premier UI/UX Design Courseamirshaikhv21realtyp
 
Dhanuka Agritech Limited - Sales and Marketing Intern
Dhanuka Agritech Limited - Sales and Marketing InternDhanuka Agritech Limited - Sales and Marketing Intern
Dhanuka Agritech Limited - Sales and Marketing Internrisabhpandeyconnect
 
2024 Google SERP Features: New Strategies To Gain Visibility
2024 Google SERP Features: New Strategies To Gain Visibility2024 Google SERP Features: New Strategies To Gain Visibility
2024 Google SERP Features: New Strategies To Gain VisibilitySearch Engine Journal
 
Snapshot of Consumer Behaviors of February 2024-EOLiSurvey (EN).pdf
Snapshot of Consumer Behaviors of February 2024-EOLiSurvey (EN).pdfSnapshot of Consumer Behaviors of February 2024-EOLiSurvey (EN).pdf
Snapshot of Consumer Behaviors of February 2024-EOLiSurvey (EN).pdfEastern Online-iSURVEY
 
Cricket Playbook for Growth Marketers: Adjust x Glance report
Cricket Playbook for Growth Marketers: Adjust x Glance reportCricket Playbook for Growth Marketers: Adjust x Glance report
Cricket Playbook for Growth Marketers: Adjust x Glance reportSocial Samosa
 
What's Happening with Your Microsoft Advertising's Search Campaigns? - Sophie...
What's Happening with Your Microsoft Advertising's Search Campaigns? - Sophie...What's Happening with Your Microsoft Advertising's Search Campaigns? - Sophie...
What's Happening with Your Microsoft Advertising's Search Campaigns? - Sophie...Sophie Logan
 
The best Crypto Marketing Strategies pdf
The best Crypto Marketing Strategies pdfThe best Crypto Marketing Strategies pdf
The best Crypto Marketing Strategies pdfShifali roy
 
Ppt regarding of Digital Marketing cours
Ppt regarding of Digital Marketing coursPpt regarding of Digital Marketing cours
Ppt regarding of Digital Marketing courstegveersingh09
 
scope in Digital Marketing & advertising
scope in Digital Marketing & advertisingscope in Digital Marketing & advertising
scope in Digital Marketing & advertisingKBS SHOP
 
Podvertise.fm - Podcast Advertising Marketplace - Startup Pitch Deck
Podvertise.fm - Podcast Advertising Marketplace - Startup Pitch DeckPodvertise.fm - Podcast Advertising Marketplace - Startup Pitch Deck
Podvertise.fm - Podcast Advertising Marketplace - Startup Pitch DeckNedko Nedkov
 
Friends of Search '24 - Scaling SEO_ Lessons for All Types of Sites.pptx
Friends of Search '24 - Scaling SEO_ Lessons for All Types of Sites.pptxFriends of Search '24 - Scaling SEO_ Lessons for All Types of Sites.pptx
Friends of Search '24 - Scaling SEO_ Lessons for All Types of Sites.pptxGregory Edwards
 
Increase Your Website Sales & Leads Webinar
Increase Your Website Sales & Leads WebinarIncrease Your Website Sales & Leads Webinar
Increase Your Website Sales & Leads WebinarSEO Optimizers
 
Voltas turnaround strategy management case
Voltas turnaround strategy management caseVoltas turnaround strategy management case
Voltas turnaround strategy management caseAnkit Sarkar
 
Digital Marketing Analytics: Driving Hotel Success (2016 May report)
Digital Marketing Analytics: Driving Hotel Success (2016 May report)Digital Marketing Analytics: Driving Hotel Success (2016 May report)
Digital Marketing Analytics: Driving Hotel Success (2016 May report)yaeyukimoto
 
SVETLANA YONCHEVA Evolution of digital marketing.pdf
SVETLANA YONCHEVA Evolution of digital marketing.pdfSVETLANA YONCHEVA Evolution of digital marketing.pdf
SVETLANA YONCHEVA Evolution of digital marketing.pdfvikrs213
 
Imposter Syndrome in Marketing & Why You're Not Alone
Imposter Syndrome in Marketing & Why You're Not AloneImposter Syndrome in Marketing & Why You're Not Alone
Imposter Syndrome in Marketing & Why You're Not AloneHerd
 
The Creative Marketing campaigns of WeRoad
The Creative Marketing campaigns of WeRoadThe Creative Marketing campaigns of WeRoad
The Creative Marketing campaigns of WeRoadFabio Bin
 
Ice Cream Brand Harmony Study - TINT Emotional Profiling Research
Ice Cream Brand Harmony Study - TINT Emotional Profiling ResearchIce Cream Brand Harmony Study - TINT Emotional Profiling Research
Ice Cream Brand Harmony Study - TINT Emotional Profiling ResearchTINT Marketing
 
Harnessing Social Media for Marketing Growth
Harnessing Social Media for Marketing GrowthHarnessing Social Media for Marketing Growth
Harnessing Social Media for Marketing Growthabinashdm2014
 
SEO Trends in 2024: What You Need to Know to Succeed
SEO Trends in 2024: What You Need to Know to SucceedSEO Trends in 2024: What You Need to Know to Succeed
SEO Trends in 2024: What You Need to Know to SucceedMumbai Pixels
 

Dernier (20)

Elevate Your Design Skills: Enroll in Pune's Premier UI/UX Design Course
Elevate Your Design Skills: Enroll in Pune's Premier UI/UX Design CourseElevate Your Design Skills: Enroll in Pune's Premier UI/UX Design Course
Elevate Your Design Skills: Enroll in Pune's Premier UI/UX Design Course
 
Dhanuka Agritech Limited - Sales and Marketing Intern
Dhanuka Agritech Limited - Sales and Marketing InternDhanuka Agritech Limited - Sales and Marketing Intern
Dhanuka Agritech Limited - Sales and Marketing Intern
 
2024 Google SERP Features: New Strategies To Gain Visibility
2024 Google SERP Features: New Strategies To Gain Visibility2024 Google SERP Features: New Strategies To Gain Visibility
2024 Google SERP Features: New Strategies To Gain Visibility
 
Snapshot of Consumer Behaviors of February 2024-EOLiSurvey (EN).pdf
Snapshot of Consumer Behaviors of February 2024-EOLiSurvey (EN).pdfSnapshot of Consumer Behaviors of February 2024-EOLiSurvey (EN).pdf
Snapshot of Consumer Behaviors of February 2024-EOLiSurvey (EN).pdf
 
Cricket Playbook for Growth Marketers: Adjust x Glance report
Cricket Playbook for Growth Marketers: Adjust x Glance reportCricket Playbook for Growth Marketers: Adjust x Glance report
Cricket Playbook for Growth Marketers: Adjust x Glance report
 
What's Happening with Your Microsoft Advertising's Search Campaigns? - Sophie...
What's Happening with Your Microsoft Advertising's Search Campaigns? - Sophie...What's Happening with Your Microsoft Advertising's Search Campaigns? - Sophie...
What's Happening with Your Microsoft Advertising's Search Campaigns? - Sophie...
 
The best Crypto Marketing Strategies pdf
The best Crypto Marketing Strategies pdfThe best Crypto Marketing Strategies pdf
The best Crypto Marketing Strategies pdf
 
Ppt regarding of Digital Marketing cours
Ppt regarding of Digital Marketing coursPpt regarding of Digital Marketing cours
Ppt regarding of Digital Marketing cours
 
scope in Digital Marketing & advertising
scope in Digital Marketing & advertisingscope in Digital Marketing & advertising
scope in Digital Marketing & advertising
 
Podvertise.fm - Podcast Advertising Marketplace - Startup Pitch Deck
Podvertise.fm - Podcast Advertising Marketplace - Startup Pitch DeckPodvertise.fm - Podcast Advertising Marketplace - Startup Pitch Deck
Podvertise.fm - Podcast Advertising Marketplace - Startup Pitch Deck
 
Friends of Search '24 - Scaling SEO_ Lessons for All Types of Sites.pptx
Friends of Search '24 - Scaling SEO_ Lessons for All Types of Sites.pptxFriends of Search '24 - Scaling SEO_ Lessons for All Types of Sites.pptx
Friends of Search '24 - Scaling SEO_ Lessons for All Types of Sites.pptx
 
Increase Your Website Sales & Leads Webinar
Increase Your Website Sales & Leads WebinarIncrease Your Website Sales & Leads Webinar
Increase Your Website Sales & Leads Webinar
 
Voltas turnaround strategy management case
Voltas turnaround strategy management caseVoltas turnaround strategy management case
Voltas turnaround strategy management case
 
Digital Marketing Analytics: Driving Hotel Success (2016 May report)
Digital Marketing Analytics: Driving Hotel Success (2016 May report)Digital Marketing Analytics: Driving Hotel Success (2016 May report)
Digital Marketing Analytics: Driving Hotel Success (2016 May report)
 
SVETLANA YONCHEVA Evolution of digital marketing.pdf
SVETLANA YONCHEVA Evolution of digital marketing.pdfSVETLANA YONCHEVA Evolution of digital marketing.pdf
SVETLANA YONCHEVA Evolution of digital marketing.pdf
 
Imposter Syndrome in Marketing & Why You're Not Alone
Imposter Syndrome in Marketing & Why You're Not AloneImposter Syndrome in Marketing & Why You're Not Alone
Imposter Syndrome in Marketing & Why You're Not Alone
 
The Creative Marketing campaigns of WeRoad
The Creative Marketing campaigns of WeRoadThe Creative Marketing campaigns of WeRoad
The Creative Marketing campaigns of WeRoad
 
Ice Cream Brand Harmony Study - TINT Emotional Profiling Research
Ice Cream Brand Harmony Study - TINT Emotional Profiling ResearchIce Cream Brand Harmony Study - TINT Emotional Profiling Research
Ice Cream Brand Harmony Study - TINT Emotional Profiling Research
 
Harnessing Social Media for Marketing Growth
Harnessing Social Media for Marketing GrowthHarnessing Social Media for Marketing Growth
Harnessing Social Media for Marketing Growth
 
SEO Trends in 2024: What You Need to Know to Succeed
SEO Trends in 2024: What You Need to Know to SucceedSEO Trends in 2024: What You Need to Know to Succeed
SEO Trends in 2024: What You Need to Know to Succeed
 

States of the American Millennial

  • 1. 3 STATES A M E R I C A N M I L L E N N I A L OF THE OGILVY RED THINK SERIES OCT 2015
  • 2. 4
  • 4. 6 The supposed teen-to-early-thirtysomething generation is nothing more than a convenient idea, a series of uninteresting generalizations existing solely in the heads of media pundits and marketers. There is no shortage of self-anointed experts on the topic (including a fellow who’s titled himself ‘Mr. Millennial’), who pen speeches about Millennials’ purported affections for smart watches, mobile payments, world travel, connectivity, health and fitness, and being ‘always- on.’ Such experts are, unfortunately, missing the point. And what a pity, because the realities of this American cohort’s experiences run the gamut of scintillating to stagnating, awe-inspiring to heartbreaking.
  • 5. 7 America is now changing too quickly for people with a twenty year age difference to possess a common history. A 33 year old Millennial remembers what it was like to first get dial-up in- ternet access; a 13 year old has never been without Facebook. One generation, many realities: A whole world of change occurring between some influential headsets.
  • 6. 8 Millennials are actually a series of subgroups, most quickly divided by the factors of age and socioeconomic situation. To begin remedying past errors of communication, I refer to “old Millennials”and“youngMillennials”inordertotease out important differences. Additionally, income inequality runs so rampant among this generation that both The Economist and The New York Times have recently questioned why riots have not yet broken out in the streets. “Why aren’t the poor storming the barricades?” asks The Economist. The New York Times blames a lingering, vastly aggrandized notion of the individual’s importance in American society (more on that in a moment), but the tide could soon change.
  • 7. 9 entrepreneurial members of the older Millennial subset are altogether reinventing the planet. Earlier this year, the UN speculated that world hunger could be completely eradicated by 2025; MIT’s City Farm initiative is developing 12 inch by 12 inch vertical garden bases that could feed an urban family for months. Elon Musk’s new solar battery could eventually take homes off the grid. The sharing economy is teaching us to live—and thrive—on much less. Social media networks, though still in their infancy, are teaching us to extend our circle of caring. When someone gets married, we emerge from life’s woodwork to post a quick note of congratulations. The ‘Like’ button— an older Millennial’s invention—might be a bit silly, but the sentiment behind it is not. Vertical Farming: In the future, we won’t waste so much space. ONAHOPEFULNOTE
  • 8. 10 We find the states of the American Millennial in between these sets of extremes—the prosperous might of Silicon Valley, the resource- barren inner cities and emptying suburbs; those of us who witnessed Steve Jobs delivering his liminal iPhone keynote speech in 2007 while gathered around laptops like campfires, and those of us who unearthed the YouTube of it years later, watching it as a historical text. We will attempt to imagine their near future without making generalizations about the few (the ‘wearable tech-loving’ rich people most often contorted by the media to represent ‘all Millennials’) at the expense of ignoring the many (the 90% of Americans who collectively only control 25% of this nation’s wealth; the 90% of Americans who do not currently see a clear place for themselves in our economic future as jobs automate or move overseas). It is here that we find the American Millennials.
  • 9. 11
  • 10. 12
  • 12. 14
  • 14. 16 AMERICAN FAMILY INCOME DISTRIBUTION Source: Integrated Public Use Microdata Series (IPUMS). Unit of analysis is the family. The initial year is 1959 because the income variables in a decennial census or March Current Population Surey (CPS) interview refer to the preceding calendar year.
  • 15. 17 and have never lived outside the upper-middle- class bubble, the danger increases that the people who have so much influence on the course of the nation have little direct experience with the lives of ordinary Americans, and make their judgements about what’s good for other people based on their own highly atypical lives.” AS THE NEW UPPER CLASS INCREASINGLY CONSISTS OF PEOPLE WHO WERE BORN INTO UPPER-MIDDLE-CLASS FAMILIES - Charles A. Murray, “Coming Apart” “
  • 16. 18 In a nation facing ever-increasing financial inequality, MILLENNIALS INHERITED AN AMERICAN DREAM SO FANTASTICALLY UNREALISTIC, THEY HAD NO CHOICE BUT TO REWRITE IT. After all, who can afford a mortgage when they’re burdened with a trillion collective dollars in student debt? Who wants to have multiple kids amid record levels of underemployment and a workforce largely turning to overseas workers and robots? Who will ever retire if Social Security is slated to run dry in 2033? If, in the words of Da Vinci, art lives from constraints and dies from freedom, then it’s no wonder that a subset of older Millennials have become gloriously inventive. Given the dire circumstances (and the historic lack of substantial government intervention), the generation’s brightest business leadersarereinventing100year legacy business models—from advertising to automotives— so quickly it’s as if it’s for sport.
  • 17. 19 PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA has called our nation’s rising income inequality “The defining challenge of our time.” If income, for most people, is not rising, then the only viable solution is to learn to live on less. Thankfully, this sentiment is the very bedrock of the older Millennial-created sharing economy. In a display of considerable vision and might, Airbnb has just launched an ad campaign for its “Belong Anywhere” tagline. The campaign opens with some of the most formidable questions that humanity has asked since the dawn of civilization: “Is man kind? Are we good?” Quickly, the viewer can see Airbnb’s answer: a resounding, absolute yes. After all, if we can share strangers’ homes, then there is no such thing as strangers anymore, right? This proposed virtue is not to be considered lightly, as Airbnb is now one of the most valuable companies in the world. Look to Airbnb’s model: they are aiding the American middle class when the government is not (more on that later). While companies their size routinely deplete the earth of resources, Airbnb uses existing resources. In a world of increasing inequality, Airbnb is increasing equality.
  • 18. 20
  • 19. 21 OMG, MILLENNIALS L I K E , A R E S O ENTITLED
  • 20. 22 MILLENNIALS MISUNDERSTOOD. OF BEING EXPERIENCE SHARE THE Trend reports love to assume the lackadaisical tropes of young adulthood, making blanket statements like “Millennials aren’t into politics.” These reports cite stats describing low voter turnout and a general distrust in government. Edward Mendelson embodies this sentiment well in a recent interview with The Baffler’s John Summers wherein he says, of today’s youth, “People who are staring at their cell phones never rampage. They merely bump into things.”
  • 21. 23 MILLENNIALS OF BEING EXPERIENCE SHARE THE What Mendelson misses is that even though thebodypoliticof(especiallyolder)Millennials may not look the same as that of Boomers in the 1960s, it exists. In 2012, Reddit co- founder Aaron Swartz, then 26 years old, led a national effort to prevent the passage of the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) by generating an online petition and an accompanying Twitter protest, all without needing to leave his apartment. As part of this digital protest, millions of Twitter users changed their profile pictures to feature an anti-SOPA logo. These protesters fought against significant odds— after all, what congressperson understands anything about the internet, let alone SOPA?— but the modernist, mobile-era tactics worked: SOPA was stopped.
  • 22. 24 More recently, New York asked the private tech sector to help them build a social media platform – – as a way to adapt government services to the behavior patterns of younger citizens, rather than expecting those citizens to change. SOMETHING MORE LIKE FACEBOOK 311
  • 23. 25 Lastly, in June of 2015, after the Supreme Court’s monumental marriage ruling served as a rallying cry for much of the nation, social media proved a fertile ground for unexpected amounts of pro-LGBTQ self-expression, with 26MM users altering their personal profile picture so that it featured a Pride flag. This idea originated at Facebook, and it had even bigger intentions than supporting 2015 advances in human rights. As The Atlantic chronicled, “Facebook is looking at what factors contributed to a person changing his or her profile photo, but the implication of their research is much larger: At stake is our understanding of whether groups of citizens can organize online—and how that collective activity affects larger social movements.” Old, young, rich and poor Millennials all support (and consistently have supported) LGBTQ rights in far greater numbers than their elder generations, and were an elemental part of America’s recent sociopolitical transformation. Millennials’ participation was essential to the movement, even if their boldest public act was to add a rainbow filter to a Facebook profile photo; for a teen in rural Alabama, that one act might have required tremendous bravery. The success of rainbow profiles and SOPA hashtags demonstrates the sort of latent generational political potential of Millennials that academics like Edward Mendelson consistently miss; however, if a simple online act yields federal change, then it is still a protest, and it is absolutely still revolutionary.
  • 25. 27
  • 27. 29 Yes, Millennials are protesting, though it does not look like other protesting. Yes, Millennials are paying attention to the world around them, even though their response is different; sometimes it comes not in the form of a political dispute, but in the form of a startup that offers people a better way. Millennials also remain a young generation, even in its ‘older’ cohorts. After all, who’s to underestimate a group of people that, according to The New York Times’ Clive Thompson, reads and writes more prolifically than any culture since the ancient Greeks? Millennials bring the country not only hope, but great hope. And this is certainly not the first time that America’s aspirations have drastically altered within the confines of a reality. YES MILLENNIALS PROTESTING ARE
  • 28. 30
  • 30. 32 1THE NEW SELF SMALL SELFis the No More Endless Aspiring to “Strike It Rich;”
  • 31. 33 1THE SINGLE MOST IMPORTANT trend common to all the Millennial generational cohorts is a sharp decrease in interest in homeownership. This trend will be thesolebasisofthedeconstruction andreconstructionoftheAmerican Dream. Its importance cannot be overstated.
  • 32. 34 wherein hard work renders economic ascension possible from any rung in society. In an era of ever-increasing income inequality, shrinking natural resources and continual job outsourcing, this dream has become especially farcical. Millennials, unlike the Xers before them, are notparticularlyinterestedinbuyinghomes, which to date has been America’s primary method of wealth accumulation. Weary of home-as-investment, many Millennials are decoupling the emotion around the word ‘home’ from the functional notion of ‘ownership.’ To most Millennials, a rented home can still be a home if it contains the people (and pets) that you love. CENTURIES AGO AMERICAWASBUILT ONTHEBACKOFA HORATIOALGER-STYLE RAGS-TO-RICHES FANTASY,
  • 33. 35 In the recent words of The Washington Post: “The homeownership rate in the U.S. has been tumbling since the height of the housing boom. Fewer and fewer of us own our homes — because foreclosures claimed them from us, or because the housing bust taught us to be wary, or because the economy ensured that families who might have bought in the past can’t afford a home today.” This shift has occurred for a host of very powerful reasons. An American economy predicated, since 1942, on selling Americans home mortgages they can’t afford, therefore tethering them to organization life and stabilizing the GDP—went dreadfully awry in 2008. How dreadfully awry? From the end of World War II to the beginning of the housing bubble in 1997, American housing prices actually stayed quite stable. However, between 1997 and 2006, the price of the typical American home increased by 124%. A N D T H E N I T A L L C O L L A P S E D . Millennials watched parents, aunts and uncles, and other adults be ravaged by the financial crisis of 2008.
  • 35. 37 Consider the ignominious vastness of the classic, Midwest American 1990s Toll Brothers great room: itsvaultedceilingsdesignedalmostpurposefullyto bleed heat in the winter and air conditioning in the summer. Since this unaffordable room’s heyday, Americans’ tastes may have collectively changed for the better. It’s a bit of a stretch, but one of Steve Jobs’ greatest legacies was in teaching the world that the design of something really matters, that its ingenuity is the aggregate of choices made about its features, materials, longevity, environmental impact, and overall aesthetic appeal. Perhaps, in the wake of such teachings, it’s become too hard to go from admiring the thoughtful curves and proportions of a smartphone (or a well-done IKEA item, or a Shake Shack burger, or a Toms Shoe- -the thoughtfully-designed-ordinary-object list is too long to continue) to then facing the usual Toll Brothers chicanery. Dreams Deferred: The Bluth family home in “Arrested Development”
  • 37. 39 Another important move is the potential departure of the ideal home being a large home. According to CNN, as of 2014, “The average size of homes built last year hit 2,600 square feet, an all-time high that surpassed even the housing bubble years, when homes averaged around 2,400 square feet.” Now that many Americans have been priced out of owning such homes, the simplicity of tiny homes is beginning to hold broader appeal. Like the best trends, tiny homes will increase in popularity partially due to necessity (most Millennials will not have another option) and partially from cultural ingenuity. After all, if you have less home, you have considerably fewer expenses, which can be a great thing. “A tiny house costs anywhere between $10,000 and $40,000 to build, with the average being just $23,000. At such low prices, it’s no wonder that 68 percent of tiny house owners don’t have a mortgage. It’s been estimated that Millennials are the newest and largest group of potential homebuyers. However, more than 50 percent rent because they can’t afford the initial down payment. Tiny housing, as a result, can be an appealing alternative, particularly since many Millennials live alone or don’t have children.” As recently noted by real estate investor Marco Rubel:
  • 38. 40 Tiny home terms are wonderfully practical Concurrently, Tesla’s home battery will only make the small home and the eco home more possible (and more affordable).
  • 39. 41 The Verge, in an article titled “Why Tesla’s Battery For Your Home Should Terrify Utilities,” suggested what follows: “The prospect of cheap solar panels combined with powerful batteries has been a source of significant anxiety in the utility sector. Suddenly regulated monopolies are finding themselves in competition with their own customers.” An Edison Electric Institute report suggested that the transition could be as abrupt as the shift from landlines to cell phones. FORECAST STORAGE MARKET from GTM Research 0 200 400 600 800 1000 1200 2011 2012 2013 2013E 2015E 2016E 2017E 2018E $57 $140 $56 $42 $144 $380 $563 $1,001 Residential (Million $) Non-Residential (Million $)
  • 40. 42 Cumulatively, the aspiration to ‘live onless’couldbethesinglegreatest thing to happen to America’s middle class since FDR’s New Deal. Ending a cycle of endless, mindless consumption could enable Americans to live lives they can afford and find meaning through nature and community.
  • 42. 44 Recently, trending topics on social media show an American populace intrigued by a killer new idea about home, community and meaning: instead of a McMansion, why not aspire to live in a “bestie row” of eco-houses, alongside your nearest and dearest? DOESN’T THAT SOUND LIKE A LOT MORE FUN?
  • 43. 45 “I’m happy to see the little-house movement taking off. If anything ‘good’ came out of the recession, it was people hitting reset and realizing they don’t need so much space and stuff to be happy. I feel proud to be working with clients who have had that realization, that less is more.” The ‘Bestie Row’ architect on the viral phenomena of the article:
  • 44. 46 This new notion of HITTING IT BIG BY KEEPING IT SMALL is about so much more than the size of one’s house. Journalists (in places like Medium Matter, The New York Times and The New Yorker) are beginning to question Americans’ ceaseless quest for grandiosity on a spiritual as well as material level, almost as if the latter made room for the former. David Brooks has become especially curious about the topic lately, with his article on life’s purpose gaining such groundswell momentum that he’s now launched a full series of articles on the topic, as well as a portion of the NYT’s website where readers can submit their own essays on the matter. A prefabricated home
  • 45. 47
  • 46. 48 2
  • 49. 51 As previously noted, Airbnb has become one of the most valuable companies in the world in just a handful of years. Older Millennials have warmed to the idea, getting over the ‘creepy’ part of staying in someone else’s house to now fully embrace it, and younger Millennials have never known an adult world without it.
  • 50. 52 AIRBNBAIRBNB: NOT SOME RICH PEOPLE THING In very heartening news, Airbnb’s June 2015 study of its American user base revealed that the company has not created some rich kid’s global playground. The report, titled “The Impact of Airbnb on Middle Class Income Stagnation”, cites that the company is no less than “an economic lifeline, making it possible to pay the bills and make ends meet.” Aside from being the powerful driver of positive change for whathadbecomeanincredibly corrupthousingmarket,Airbnb has created something else that will continue to reshape the American socioeconomic system: more trust. Again, note the lack of government intervention and the reliance of Millennial startup invention. In order to share someone’s home, you first have to trust them. This idea sounds simpler and less pervasive that it really is: soon our credit scores will be 90% based on our ‘social’ scores, a very logical step in a world of sharing economies that depend on us being highly trustworthy and generally well-intended toward each other. Mistreat an Airbnb home, leave the place a mess? Maybe American Express won’t want you as a Gold cardmember. This is karma’s (slightly creepy, yet slightly inevitable) shining moment. Sharing America: Building A Bedrock of Trust
  • 51. 53 BFROM A SCHOLAR AT THE UNIVERSITY OF WARWICK COMES THIS MODEL: More positively, trust actually begets the creation of more trust. It could easily be argued that the public nature of the sharing economy actually makes us better people. From a psychological standpoint, knowing that others are watching increases our desire to impress.
  • 52. 54 2SHARING THE SAD The bright future of reality of privacy
  • 53. 55 “Technology develops cumulatively, rather than in isolated heroic acts.” Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs and Steel
  • 54. 56 “[In the future] there will be chips all over the high street relaying information and you will be bombarded with digital information everywhere you go. You will need a digital bubble force field — a shield that lets through what you want and blocks everything else.” Ian Pearson, futurist, 2005
  • 55. 57 itsuseswillquicklyproliferate.Thenew social score will be used everywhere. Unfortunately there is, so far, a lack of privacy around such data (though in the future it’s not a stretch to imagine a second type of sharing economy proliferating, based off a more Bitcoin- like notion of private, encrypted, but still-validated trust). Millennials,youngandold,richandpoor, are yet to see any real repercussion from so much of their data and identity now being fully accessible. As a result, they largely don’t care about internet security when polled on the matter. ONCE THE TRUST GRID EXISTS, A screenshot from my location history in Google Maps, one of Google’s lesser-known features. Google has an archive of my every single location for the past 5+ years. This morning, you’ll see, I commuted from my home in DUMBO to the New York office of Ogilvy & Mather. With the bottom slider you can see that I left home at 8:30, got out of the subway at 9:10 and arrived at Ogilvy at 9:20. This is the kind of tracking that currently does not concern American Millennials.
  • 56. 58 IT WILL ULTIMATELY BE THE MILLENNIALS’ RESPONSIBILITY to continue Ed Snowden’s planet- altering work in protecting human privacy, and given the generation’s collective lack of concern for the matter, privacy might be something Generation Z has to fix. Additionally, the generation’s sense of humor and current ‘who cares’ attitude toward public surveillance have had an interesting effect on the broader culture. Case in point: in a desperate grasp at relevance, the CIA emerged on Twitter in mid-2014 as if the agency was entering a bar at happy hour, greeting a bunch of pals from work. Interesting tonality choice, given the agency’s foreign and domestic roles in society; seemingly one only the ¯_(:/)_/¯ Millennial era could yield.
  • 57. 59 Everyone’s a Comedian: The CIA makes an appeal to Millennial youth with its first tweet.
  • 58. 60 3
  • 60. 62 3 An overhaul of life expectations and living situations will inevitably produce an influential overhaul of the transportation system. Though the sharing economy is set to transform too many lines of business to detail here, transportation is important for 3 reasons: IT REFLECTS IT ALTERS IT AFFECTS ANOTHER RAPID TRANSFORMATION IN MILLENNIALS’ CORE VALUES OUR RELATIONSHIP TO COMMUNITY AND GOVERNMENT THE EVERYDAY. O3 O2 O1
  • 62. 64 Cars have meant different things to older and younger Millennials. Older Millennials counted the days until they could get their permits and licenses as teens, and the freedom a car provided was the definitive adolescent milestone. Their first cell phone was the freedom. Who wants to fight with parents about going to visit a girl, when you could not fight with them and text her from the safety of your room instead? Less than 50% of younger Millennials have even bothered to get a license when they legally could. That percentage continues to drop every year. YOUNGER MILLENNIALS? Couldn’t care less. Freedom, Old Millennials-Style Freedom, Young Millennials-Style: The popular messaging app Kik
  • 63. 65 Younger Millennials might really be onto something: from a safety standpoint, it’s probably a good thing that cars are becoming a commodity. Younger Millennials have largely already dismissed the idea of owning a car. Again, the pattern of this generation’s ability to completely dismiss century-old ritual and expectation is apparent. THEYARETOTALLY COOLWITHWILD AMOUNTSOF CHANGE.
  • 65. 67 HELICOPTERS BUSES AIRPLANES LONG CAR RIDES BOATS Blade Bridj, RidePal NetJets Split Coastalyfe, GetMyBoat THOUGH EVERY TYPE OF TRANSPORT NOW HAS ITS “UBER,” CURRENTLY THERE’S A DOWNSIDE FOR MANY MILLENNIALS. These new transport methods are currently accompanied by extreme income inequality, and will be so for at least the foreseeable future. There is a ripple effect to this sort of en masse privatization that has a serious effect on broader society. As The New York Times notes, “Santa Clara County Valley TransportationAuthorityexecutives note that 20 percent of the workers who ride the private tech fleets between San Francisco and Silicon Valley would have otherwise used public transit. The dark outlook presented by the explosion of private transit systems is that an elite class of tech workers will be moved in style, while the overall quality of transit will decline.” In the long haul, there is still reason for optimism. For example, Helsinki’s goal is to go car-free. In the meantime, transport is another form of inequality that less affluent Millennials will have to contend with in order to succeed.
  • 66. 68
  • 68. 70 “Weshoulddoawaywiththeabsolutelyspeciousnotion that everybody has to earn a living. It is a fact today that one in ten thousand of us can make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest. The youth of today are absolutely right in recognizing this nonsense of earning a living. We keep inventing jobs because of this false idea that everybody has to be employed at some kind of drudgery because, according to Malthusian Darwinian theory he must justify his right to exist. So we have inspectors of inspectors and people making instruments for inspectors to inspect inspectors. The true business of people should be to go back to school and think about whatever it was they were thinking about before somebody came along and told them they had to earn a living.” ― R. Buckminster Fuller, 1960
  • 69. 71 WITH LESS HOUSE, LESS (OWNED) STUFF, LESS MORTAGE, YOU NEED LESS JOB LESS FAMILY, LESS CAR, (the birthrate is at a historic low, and continues to drop every year) Consider what that insight could mean for the Millennial era of the American economy in that one aforementioned question: What happens to the future of employment when it’s no longer an economic necessity to be employed?
  • 70. 72 RIP, Boomer and Xer-style employment. We’ll miss your excellent office accessories.
  • 71. 73 IS THETHE TRUTHIS America already isn’t fully employed. That’s been the economic reality for the entire Obama administration—and it’s time for our culture to start improving and reflecting the new status quo, rather than trying to ‘hope’ it into becoming something it’s not.
  • 72. 74 A recent piece in The Atlantic titled examines the stark truth that many former American hubs of manufacturing are now ghost towns, and many of America’s most popular careers will soon be automated. The top 4 professionsintheUSalone—retail salesperson, cashier, food and beverage server, and office clerk— are professions that employ a full 15.4 million Americans, or 10% of our workforce. All of these professions (and many more) are at substantial risk of being outsourced to software in the very, very near future. “ “ And the article goes on to note: “In 1964, the nation’s most valuable company, AT&T, was worth $267 billion in today’s dollars and employed 758,611 people. Today’s telecommunications giant, Google, is worth $370 billion but has only about 55,000 employees—less than a tenth the size of AT&T’s workforce in its heyday. ...The share of prime-age Americans (25 to 54 years old) who are working has been trending down since 2000. Among men, the decline began even earlier: the share of prime-age men who are neither working nor looking for work has doubled since the late 1970s, and has increased as much throughout the recovery as it did during the Great Recession itself.” THE END OF WORK
  • 73. 75 in the country’s economics that more Millennials, old and young, rich and poor, will learn to live without holding down full- time jobs. There will be numerous, obvious upsides. New cultures will emerge around ‘working without work.’ Needing more structured ways to busy themselves, communal efforts born from a sharing economy-style ethos will emerge,inwhichpeoplecanderivethesenseofpersonal satisfaction and purpose that comes from working efforts that don’t necessarily pay in money. Think back to the WPA from FDR’s New Deal, and you can start to imagine how diverse skillsets could be put to use en masse (even though likely, with the Republican Party’s current interest in small government, it will be startups that offer Millennials these services, or at least broker them through the appropriate government agencies, not the government agents directly themselves). IT IS WITH THIS CHANGE 1930s Economic Revival & The WPA: As much about art as it was about industry
  • 74. 76 Canoe House, University of Iowa: One of the WPA’s loveliest legacies
  • 75. 77 Working for satisfaction and not money is actually quite realistic. After all, we do ‘make’ things in our spare time: we created Wikipedia and we upload 400,000 hours of YouTube video every day. We make so much stuff online that the IDC projects that the digital universe will reach 40 zettabytes (ZB) by 2020.
  • 76. 78 The Columbus Idea Foundry: The world’s largest makerspace is in Ohio. It helps those displaced by a changing global economy find a way to ‘do’ things again, and is credited with representing the future of communal space.
  • 77. 79 Academics are studying the many ways to make a life without a high annual income. As one expert says in The End of Work, “A lot of people in the [under- employed] cities make post-wage arrangements, working for tenancy under the table, or trading services.” Full time corporate employment is, after all, a relatively new notion in American history, an evolution of post-agrarian industry. Perhaps as technology improves, we’ll migrate back to a more agrarian model, albeit with the aid of a thousand wonderful adventures that our grandparents could never have dreamed of. (And more on that in a minute.)
  • 78. 80 3 WHITE COLLAR AMERICA ‘Startup’ will lose a lot of its reverie
  • 79. 81 3 Much in the way that top universities are responding to the presence of startups by becoming more like startups (online learning, venture-funded programs, etc.) big corporate jobs will soon modernize by acting more like the startups that compete with them. For those lucky enough to remain in America’s white collar workforce in ten years, this transformation will be quite beneficial.
  • 80. 82 Startup life, however, will start to lose its luster once venture capital funding normalizes and the market corrects; the VC industry is currently enjoying its current all-time investment high (over $52B in total last year). The fires of this enthusiasm remained fanned by IPOs like Twitter, which is some- how still a publicly traded company despite being unable to retain users, grow users, turn a profit or innovate. The primary reason that startup jobs will become less revered by highly educated, experienced, aging Millennials? The industry’s base expectation that all employees take salaries at significantly less value than they’re worth, on the (very) off- chancethatstockoptionswillvestand the company will IPO. Estimates vary, but approximately 97% of startups see no such wealth-creating exit. These talented minds are therefore currently accepting less money to make less money, and often for years of their careers—with no upside attached other than a branded hoodie and some free lunch. Such economic dalliances are unconcerning to the young only: no parent thinks lightly of taking a 60% pay cut. College/Startup Mashup: Stanford’s Venture Studio
  • 81. 83 , Fortune 500 companies will lure talent by starting to borrow the best aspects of startup culture (project-based work, clearer upsides for successes, agile teams) as Millennials take over the C-suite roles and implement the ideas of their startup brethren. White collar careers will soon look more like a pastiche of activities, a mosaic, rather than a linear ascension. Having a side hustle will not only be standard, but encouraged, because it means your employees possess a richer myriad of skills. The company man can now have a company on the side. INSTEAD Man-children at work and play in the offices of Hooli, the thinly veiled parody of Google from the hit HBO show “Silicon Valley”
  • 83. 85 MESSAGES SENT PER DAY (BILLIONS) Sources: Portio Research, a16z; The Economist, 2015 “WhatsApp and other over-the-top services are projected to drain global telecommunications companies of $386 billion in revenue between 2012 and 2018 from the use of OTT mobile voice calling alone. Could most telecommunications service providers survive a decline like this in a core business?” - The Global Center for Digital Business Transformation 0 5 10 15 20 25 30 1996 2000 2005 2010 2015 (forecasted) SMS WhatsApp
  • 84. 86 In other words, Samsung Electronics’ competition is no longer LG and Sony, it’s any company that feels like dabbling in screens. Both Facebook and Google have successfully proven to be capable of truly unanticipated, agile crossover: Facebook is deep in mobile payments, Google is working on curing cancer, and Amazon owns small business cloud. Not bad for a digital Rolodex, a search engine, and a bookseller. The term sometimes used here is “combinatorial innovation,” an idea credited to Hal Varian, the Chief Economist at Google and a Professor Emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley. Combinatorial innovation is steeped in the history of mechanization, and it predicts that businesses in various industries will rapidly and unexpectedly “combine” to form new products. This is the theory that could have predicted Facebook becoming Western Union and Google a medical research lab. IT’S NOT JUST THAT INDUSTRIES WILL BE REINVENTED, BUT THAT THEY WILL ALSO CROSS- POLLINATE. IN THE FUTURE ECONOMY,
  • 85. 87 The implications for such innovation are daunting: it’s one thing for companies to track their top competitors, and another for every company to be a potential competitor. Whereas now most market disruption comes from startups, corporate intra-preneurs will gain prominence in the future, as they help prepare long-established companies for wild crossover. It is interesting here to note that talent nurturing and identification will be one of the primary challenges during the next wave of Millennial work: Facebook itself famously turned down hiring Whatsapp founder Brian Acton in 2009 (as did Twitter), instead opting to pay out $19B for his company just a handful of years later. (Even Millennials sometimes struggle to identify fellow talented Millennials!) Given that the global industry’s new norm will be incessant disruption, figuring out who has the special gift for ‘knowing what’s next’ will prove an exceptionally important challenge.
  • 86. 88 Hearteningly, companies are emerging to help established, important companies hire more diversely, since diversity of experience and thought will be absolutely crucial to future innovation. Entelo has built an algorithm that helps HR departments find perfect candidates outside their “normal” (predominantly affluent, predominantly white) hunting grounds. It has been statistically proven that companies with women on their boards outperform those without. It is hopeful that Millennials, who ushered in the era of LGBTQ rights, will be more open to this critical change than the Xers and Boomers who preceded them. The $19B hiring whoopsies.
  • 87. 89 The Entelo Team: An HR startup that helps companies hire more diversely
  • 89. 91 4 Startup culture won’t go away— not in the slightest—but it will evolve and improve. The tools of mass production democratized by the internet all but insist on the continuation of industry disruption by small companies. However the norms around what a startup is and is not will change. THE MICRO STARTUP
  • 90. 92 A crop of different startups will soon emerge with different goals—comfortably supporting 3-5 employees and their families and realistic, long-term growth—rather than vaulting their debt into the stratosphere on the back of phony ‘valuation’ calculations, hoping for a huge exit or an IPO. These new, smaller ventures will sometimes be funded, sure, and sometimes the funding will come from traditional VC investors, for more reasonable terms. Sometimes funding will also come from larger corporations, as a way for those corporations to retain top talent and have access to fresh IP in a style of employment the talent finds less constraining. Most white collar Millennials see less need for a 9-to-5 office culture than their older counterparts.
  • 91. 93 will hopefully widen the entrepreneur aperture, allowing non-white, non- affluent, non-male, non-Ivy League citizens to start a startup. After all, the fortunes left to be made in Silicon Valley involve innovating for the 99%, not the 1%. Bill Gates’ vision was a computer in every home, not a computer in the richest homes. The ideas that better life for the 99% won’t occur to Silicon Valley without significant culture change. THIS LEVELING OUT OF THE ECONOMIC PLAYING FIELD Coldhubs: A brilliant startup for the 99%. In developing countries, almost half of the produced food rots in the sun; Coldhubs provides solar-powered refrigeration for an affordable fee. These are the billionaires of the future.
  • 92. 94 4 R E T I R E M E N T R E T I R E M E N T OF
  • 93. 95 4
  • 94. 96 Millennials are considerably under-financed, which is why they have no choice but to start living on significantly less. As they age, additional factors will continue to bear down on their financial future: 1. 2. 3. 4. SOCIALSECURITYISUNDER-FUNDED MILLENNIALS’LIFEEXPECTANCYWILLINCREASE COLLEGEDEBTWON’TDISAPPEAR ROBOTIZATIONOFTHEWORKFORCEISEXPECTED TOCUTBLUE(ANDWHITE)COLLARJOBS
  • 95. 97 Millennials will work through their lives, potentially changing professions, but nonetheless working. As Slate points out, “The notion of retirement is a relatively new invention. A century ago, 7 in 10 over-65s in the United Kingdom were working. Today, about 2 in 10 are. (Similar changes have happened in the United States.)” Additionally, when Otto von Bismark created the notion of a state-funded retirement pension in the 1880s, life expectancy upon hitting age 65 was a mere 18 more months. Now, it’s 23 years. NO LONGER WILL THEY RETIRE
  • 96. 98 Luckily, the purpose of technology is to make life better and cheaper. New business models are already emerging, creating entirely new layers of work. The European-based startup La Ruche Qui Dit Oui is attempting to usurp the grocery store for a market of local sellers, each covering off the production of a different bit of produce or good. Imagine a world in which you spend two days a week harvesting tomatoes, and then trade your tomatoes for the other things you need in the market. La Ruche Qui Dit Oui doesn’t just represent an accurate depiction of how artisans functioned in past economies; it represents many hard- driving venture capitalists’ vision of the future. Union Square Ventures recently led a $9MM round of funding for the startup (and, of course, all of the accompanying proprietary technology that makes scaling and running such markets so much easier than it was in the 1600s!). Imagine a life in Millennials’ older years wherein theirprimaryfinancialobligationistocontribute their week’s harvest, or their handmade chairs and tables to the communally-operated farmer’s market. Life and career can become a continual exploration, not a beginning followed by an end.
  • 97. 99 A La Ruche Qui Dit Oui market in Europe
  • 98. 100 5
  • 101. 103 5“Facebook is building an incredible moat around the future of social with Messenger and WhatsApp.” – Dan Frommer, qz
  • 102. 104 IMAGINE A NEAR FUTURE WHERE INSTEAD OF HAVING 50 APPS ON YOUR PHONE, YOU HAVE ONE APP. That app that can easily cue up 50 different APIs in a couple of commands to keystrokes, engaging companies like Uber, Foursquare, Facebook, Airbnb, Kayak and beyond. This is how we’ll all use the mobile internet in 2-3 years. This style of communication, of course, will be brought to the world by a subset of entrepreneurial, mostly older Millennials. What makes Messenger, What’s App, Line and WeChat so special?
  • 104. 106 “Here in Western markets, if you want to interact with a service from your phone, you either visit its mobile website or, more likely, you download the app. In China’s WeChat and other services across Asia, the services you may want to interact with are right there in your messenger. There’s no need to download an app: It’s as if you could just tap on an app in the App Store and start using it within the App Store app. This model will be at least somewhat disruptive to Google (because it could cut away from Search) and Apple (because it could cut away from the App Store).” Union Square Ventures’ Brian Libov recently wrote about the future of messages, explaining Eastern innovations like WeChat accordingly:
  • 105. 107 One of the most promising facets of the WeChat economy is the company’s broad user base: everyone is using WeChat’s services, shopping interfaces, payment tools, and entertainment vehicles—not just privileged few, the rich people, like in America. Here, apps are largely a trend of the affluent. 60% of people making under $40,000/year don’t download apps onto their smartphones. Over 90% of those lower income users do use texting, though, which is why introducing new services to the familiar medium of texting will drastically increase penetration among less affluent older and younger Millennials.
  • 106. 108 SERVICES LIKE FACEBOOK MESSENGER WILL REPLACE EVERY COMPANY’S 1-800 NUMBERS. In the very, very near future, Image: Brian Libov All of this chat functionality will yield far greater fluidity between strangers looking to communicate with each other from an enterprise standpoint, as well. The ‘walls’ of companies will become porous. The monolith, relatively immutable notion of ‘brand’ becomes somewhat disempowered in this environment, where more human-to- human interaction is added into the mix.
  • 107. 109 HotelTonight (which sells last minute hotel rooms at heavily discounted rates) has just releasedanewconciergefeaturecalledAces. HotelTonight staffers replace, via text, the concierge staffers presumably sitting in the lobby downstairs. (This is perfect example of many Millennials preferring one mode of communication, text—and preferring it for years—with traditional businesses refusing to change their practices.) In HotelTonight’s words, the new feature is “perfect for the always-on-the-go business traveler, those checking out a city they’ve never visited before, or anyone who just wants to plan less, live more, and let someone else handle the details.” CASEINPOINT HotelTonight’s Ace app. Note the casual language and the sincerity of the intrapersonal interaction.
  • 108. 110 Investor Chris Messina is cultivating a list of these “conversational commerce” startups on Product Hunt, all almost entirely founded by affluent Millennials. The list is already 100 companies long. Ideas include things like “Text a Stanford Nerd,” wherein anyone can asked a question or seek longer term assistance from an appropriate ‘nerd’ at Stanford University. That could be helpful not just for students, but anyadult.Imaginehowhelpfulsuchcompanies will be to the world once they are able to expand past the early-adopting 1%?
  • 110. 112 Another compelling facet of WeChat is that it is semantically sophisticated, capable of deciphering slang in a dozen different languages (including Latin!). Soon there will be far less significant barriers between any two people in the world communicating with each other. Not internet access, not language, not platform. Line, Japan’s WeChat, has inspired the creation of streams of incredibly detailed “sticker sets,” which convey nuanced emotions and situations via picture. In America, amid Millennials old and young, Emoji and Bitmoji communicate not only concepts (hamburger!) but entire worlds of emotion (‘hamburger’ can equal ennui, generalist American indulgence culture, plainness/expectedness, etc etc). Like Line stickers, Bitmoji can be especially expressive, linking popular phrases (“I can’t even!”) to a corresponding image, allowing someone who might not get the words to learn them by the picture. Bitmojis effectively can translate a slang phrase while teaching it. This ability will prove especially helpful with languages like Spanish, where much of the popular slang uses words in ways that aren’t even close to their official meaning. For example: A Line sticker from Japan.
  • 112. 114 MOST INTERESTING OF ALL IS THE GIF, or the short, animated clip most usually plucked from a popular film or TV show. GIFs are extra interesting because they can have two meanings: the literal happening in the clip (Tina Fey as Liz Lemon from 30 Rock, sarcastically rolling her eyes at Jack Donaghy, her male boss), which pretty much anyone can understand and be amused by, regardless of their familiarity with the show; and, a secondary, more furtive- yet-fun meaning to those fully in on the context of the clip, or those who are familiar enough with the referenced television show to get additional ins and outs of the joke.
  • 113. 115 GIFscanalsoassumenewmeaningsovertime,asblog commentators, writers, and regular friends on social media re-appropriate them for specific instances, thus adding to a video or image’s set of implied references. For example, a GIF or an image of a cross-eyed cat can start out as a substitute for saying “I’m out of it.” Later, a popular internet personality can look at the GIF and assume a more nuanced explanation of its circumstance: “When you’re drunk af [as fuck] but you need to act all serious for a sec.” ‘Tired, out of it’ kitten is now ‘drunk-but-feigning-interest’ kitten. When the image is referenced in a blog comment after, say, a post on a presidential candidate, it assumes both meanings. Those in on the more furtive one can have a good snicker.
  • 114. 116 Note the purposefully maligned grammar: this style of lingual play, which probably first appeared in “I Can Has Cheezburger?” in the early 2000s, was initially relegated to translating and anthropomorphizing the supposed internal monologues of pets. After all, animals can’t speak English, so if a cat somehow found its way to the keyboard and typed up its thoughts, its grammar should come off slightly mauled.
  • 116. 118 5 As messaging, new language forms, and global “inside jokes” allow for a true communal conversation, some startups are having fun with the notion that there is no longer such thing as STRANGERS
  • 117. 119 is a startup that’s seen phenomenal popularity come from a very simple idea—set an alarm, and a random stranger will call to wake you up. Wakie calls itself a “social alarm clock.” People have been reveling in this delight (as well as the positive psychological effects—you can scream at an automated alarm, but when a person calls up, they elicit a very different reaction!). Wakie’s fans swear by the the moment of pure serendipity as a fresh way to start their day. Wakie simply, brilliantly cuts to the most important of human truths: that we’re all in this together, and we need every reminder of our unity that we can get. The less automated, more human, the better. WAKIE
  • 118. 120 5 ACTUAL HUMAN EDITORS Recode, June 2015 There’s a Shiny New Trend in Social Media: “ “
  • 119. 121 5 The next round of technological innovation will get more predictive—Google’s Now can already help you avoid missing your flight due to a forming traffic jam on I-78—but it will also get more emotive, and human, too.
  • 120. 122 Apple’s latest maneuvers around reinventing music were all about hiring the humans behind Beats. Less API, more IQ. Apple isn’t unique. “In the past months, Twitter, Instagram and YouTube all announced new curation features that rely on humans to sift through and select the best content from their massive collections of user posts.” YouTube has announced a partnership with Storyful to build a new kind of newswire, one that lets eyewitnesses immediately contribute video and commentary to breaking stories. In a matter of minutes or even seconds, Storyful’s editors verify the veracity of the source, and the breaking story is told with previously unimaginable context. This is the new, true future of crowdsourced journalism. Under the aegis of human editors, young Millennials will partner with news organizations to contribute stories, interviews, videos, and other components of journalism more earnestly. Imagine, in a year or two, receiving some sort of title and official badge from The New York Times, for getting a gripping first-responder video of a forming protest? Imagine going out of your way to interview several of the organizers, and the Times not only verifying but using your piece? Imagine how great that would look to a potential employer? This is the future of crowd publishing. Older Millennials and their rambling Tumblrs will quickly become a digital vestige. A NEW KIND OF NEWSWIRE
  • 121. 123 5MILLENNIALS & THE NEWS QUIT YOUR JOB AND MAKE $10K A DAY AFTER YOU READ THIS! A subset of older white-collar Millennials will potentially be remembered for their attempt to destroy the news industry. By either starting or supporting (by means of their eyeballs) a toxic marshland of purposefully obfuscated ‘journalismism’ sites like Buzzfeed, The Huffington Post, Fusion, Thought Catalog, Elite Daily, and dozens more, Millennials have often stopped caring where the hell their information comes from, and whether or not it’s right.
  • 122. 124 is perhaps the best (as in truly the worst) example of this type of sensationalist business model in action; the company has tossed journalism and advertisements into a blender and hit the ‘Pulverize’ button. “[Marissa] Mayer is now banking on an overtly corrupt model of digital journalism to help stanch Yahoo’s steady hemorrhage of ad revenue. What Mayer is pleased to call the site’s stable of ‘digital magazines’ is, in reality, the barest of fig leaves for an orgy of sponsored content—i.e., copy commissioned, inspected, and (increasingly) edited by advertisers, and misleadingly packaged as reliable, independent journalism in order to win eyeballs and reader trust.” Y A H O O Its failings are perhaps best summarized by noted writer and former Yahoo editor Chris Lehmann:
  • 123. 125 Like the response to the ‘pink meat’ of McDonald’s by the food industry, a Shake Shack will eventually emerge to triumphantly to assume a more well-intended, noble place in the journalism world. The purposeful obfuscation of advertisements will end. It just might take some subset of Generation Z to do it. Accurate diagram of an era that we hopefully leave behind (The Baffler)
  • 124. 126 5 SILICON VALLEY’S NEW ERA OF ADVERTISING: FROM PUBLIC RELATIONS TO PUBLIC RELATIONSHIPS
  • 125. 127 5 “Americans wouldn’t care if 90% of brands disappeared tomorrow.” - Havas Media to The Guardian -
  • 126. 128 IT’S REALLY HARD TO GET PEOPLE TO CARE ABOUT BIG COMPANIES. IT’S MUCH EASIER TO GET PEOPLE TO CARE ABOUT PEOPLE. One important trend from the Millennial era (and a definite carryover from Steve Jobs) is the CEO public address. Google doesn’t have to buy 30 second spots during the World Cup to land themselves on the front page of every influential paper and blog; instead, like the world’s other innovative, powerful startups and companies, they routinely hold public conferences to explain three very important things: O3 O2 O1 WHAT THEY’RE MAKING WHY THEY’RE MAKING IT HOW IT WILL MAKE BOTH INDIVIDUALS’ (AND THE WORLD’S) EXISTENCES BETTER
  • 127. 129 ElonMuskannouncingTESLAEnergy Xiaomi, Apple, Google, Facebook, Uber, Spotify, Alibaba, Tesla, and Starbucks: these are just a few of the companies whose executives frequently take to the stage to explain their new plans in plain English. As a result, traditional marketing products and practices can look positively Byzantine to Millennials. If it’s great, if it’s noble, why not just step outside, take some questions, show some pictures and explain it? Apple takes this process so seriously they’ve just built themselves a new amphitheatre.
  • 128. 130
  • 131. 133 6“You want to know how to paint a perfect painting? It’s easy. Make yourself perfect and then just paint naturally.” - Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
  • 132. 134 SILICON VALLEYis obsessed with making your shopping experience perfect.The minute each transaction is complete, startups love to ask the user, “Did you love it?” Here’s the de facto Uber-style 1-5 star rating system that many mobile commerce companies prefer: See how easy it is to give love, from 1-5? How easy it is to complain? Offer a suggestion? Ask for more information? Comparatively, can corporate America say that it cares about how each and every one of its transactions is received?
  • 133. 135 of Millennials in America now have smartphones. Regardless of how innovative a category is, to a smartphone- bearing Millennial, its competition is the latest set of shopping standards and experiences created by Silicon Valley. Here are three trends that will shape commerce, as more thoughtful living (tiny homes, communal cars, rented goods, kaleidoscope careers, sharing and community) begets more thoughtful buying. 90%
  • 135. 137 PRODUCT EYEWEAR INDUSTRY MATTRESS INDUSTRY CAR INDUSTRY MOVIE INDUSTRY OIL INDUSTRY LIQUOR INDUSTRY O1 Fixthe If something about your business model is unethical (overly harmful to the world, or harmful to consumers by way of marked-up legacy pricing schemes), then beware, because Silicon Valley wants you gone. No amount of feel-good commercials, branding or purposefully obfuscated content plays can save you. Glasses were marked up 500% Warby Parker Forced individual ownership even though cars spend 90% of their lives idle Uber, Zipcar Didn’t ever have sales Caskers, Lot18 The environment had to die for fuel Tesla battery Marked them up 200 - 300% Casper Placed pointless constraints around content availability Netflix
  • 136. 138 Silicon Valley has trained its entrepreneurs to hunt these industries down, make replacement products that are earnest and efficient, and then put the dinosaurs out of business. Here’s venture capitalist Paul Graham on hunting down the most lucrative of the Fortune 500 dinosaurs: “Find a cure for the disease of which things like the RIAA is a symptom. Something is broken when Sony and Universal sue children [over pirated music]. Actually, at least two things are broken: the software that file sharers use, and the record labels’ business model. When the dust settles in 20 years, what will this world look like? What components of it could you start building now?” O1
  • 137. 139 Millennials are waiting for Silicon Valley to systematically reinvent every category of business; in fact, they’ve come to expect nothing less. In mere months, old and young Millennials have subverted decades and centuries-old businesses.
  • 138. 140 DISTRIBUTIONO2 Fixthe The coming era of ‘Brand Tribes’: Affluent and less affluent Millennials alike won’t have to shop in the future if they don’t want to because the machines will do it for them. Machines can even take an individual’s ethics into account while they do it. TODAY Amazon Dash TOMORROW Jet.com Just push a button you stick on your washing machine and you’ve instantly ordered more Tide. The purchase experience has been reduced to its simplest act. An advertiser’s ability to influence it is all but gone. An Amazon competitor that will make bulk discount deals on one specific product in a category. Imagine an Amazon that only sells one kind of dishwashing soap… But that dishwashing soap is half the price of competitive soaps anywhere else.
  • 139. 141 And now, the Brand Tribe explains itself: Imagine group-buying deals based on preferences. Never think about what brand of soap, garbage bag or spongemostrepresentsyou. Jetwillnotonlyfigure it out, but broker a discount based on the ‘tribe’ you’re in. The cheap-o tribe? The environmental tribe? The luxury tribe? Some blending of the aforementioned? You’ll be a member. Household purchases will be entirely automated through sensors and then filtered through your own preset preferences. Uninteresting shopping experiences are relegated to the background of life.
  • 140. 142 CRITICAL RECEPTIONO3 Fixthe The way people find products they’ll like is about to be completely overhauled. As one harbinger of the future, look to The Wirecutter, which combines the objectivity of Consumer Reports’ reviews with the potency of big data. The Wirecutter examined 15,000 data points to make near-perfect recommendations on things like ‘The best TV under $500’ and ‘The best TV over $500.’ Early adopter Millennials already swear by the service. Its best-reviewed products sell out almost immediately on Best Buy and Amazon’s websites. The Coming Era of the ‘Perfect Product Review’ There are other related players to watch:
  • 141. 143 PRODUCT HUNT A new startup that allows people to vote up or down on the hottest new products, creating a crowdsourced ‘what’s hot’ list of things you can shop for. Its vetting system can make or break a startup overnight. Product Hunt reduces the Gursky- esque sea of goods that Americans face and produces one simple, short hotlist of what’s good. This is what’s to come. Product Hunt lists the best startups of the day
  • 142. 144 ENJOY The flip side of the algorithmic perfect review. Created by the father of The Apple Store, Enjoy only sells electronics that its staff “uses and loves.” The research phase of a big electronics purchase, against which the companies in play spend millions, disappears. Enjoy website O3
  • 143. 145 GOOGLE NOW As of June 2015, Google has announced that its Now software will instantly be able to assess what product is right for you, based off of what it knows about the rest of your life (for example, I should buy a small $19.95 composter from Oxxo for my garden, because it’s well-reviewed for use on brightly lit, urban rooftop gardens, whereas my mother needs an entirely different model for her backyard garden; plus she’s a bargain-hunter and I’m not). This type of Google research will soon simplify: the next Google Now could be capable of figuring out that you’re in the TV aisle at Best Buy, considering a choice. Using all of your personal data, plus Wirecutter’s data, plus financial information from your bank account, it will automatically recommend which of the 10,000 products would really be right for you.
  • 144. 146 O3 The wonders of Google Now
  • 145. 147 It’s Not Remotely Egalitarian, Though: The affluent will pay more for the same goods and services than the less affluent (which already happens on sites like Amazon). With more data, notions of “fairness” in pricing models will change. As mentioned,Amazonalreadycharges its affluent customers extra money for the very same good. (Their logic? If they know you’ll pay $2 more because you’re too lazy to price check the good on a competitive site, why not charge it?) Airline companies also do the same thing (boosting the price based on how many times you’ve searched the flight, aka quantifying how much you desire to travel). Apple has just patented technology that allows them to know what amount of credit is left on your credit lines, so they can know what you could afford to buy. Shopping will get even more seamless and delightful, sure, but with the current lack of privacy regulation, there will be a dark side to it, as well.
  • 146. 148
  • 149. 151 The ‘Normcore’ fashion trend originates with urban, younger Millennials, popularizing the wearing of Walmart clothes as a sort of reverse fashion statement. “For when you realize you’re one in 7 billion” was one of the movement’s better taglines. These younger Millennials have realized that feeling ‘special’ is an artifice, created by marketing, and a direct legacy of Edward Bernays. Normcore: A fashion trend in which one wears only commonplace items from stores like LL Bean, Walmart, GAP and Old Navy. Also sometimes referred to as ‘anti-fashion.’
  • 150. 152 Simultaneously, a new kind of ‘fame’ is evolving— wherein well-known artists and personas subvert their real identities, preferring the freedom of true anonymity. In our post-Warhol social media era, and in the wordsofScottishartistMomus“Everyoneisfamous to 15 people,” many subsets of Millennials are interested in toying with the notions of invisibility, identity and even infamy all at the same time. We’ve already seen anonymity become a major political tool (Arab Spring), but it’s now going cultural, too. After all, Banksy—arguably the world’s most sought-after living artist—has never made his identity known to the public.
  • 151. 153 Amid the Millennial set, cult personalities like @Seinfeld2000 use multiple medias to not only tell jokes as an anonymous person, but also to act as a meta-parody of fictional characters like Jerry Seinfeld. An example of @Seinfeld2000 in action:
  • 152. 154 @Seinfeld2000 also wrote a hugely popular novella about President Barack Obama (which Warner Brothers attempted unsuccessfully to ban, citing copyright infringement), of which the opening lines, in their own invented, postmodern language, are as follows: “U.S. Presedent Barack Sadam Husene Obame sit in the darkened Oval Ofice at 2 a.m. wearing hes traditienel Kenyan robe. He take one last bite of the Chicago style deep dish pizza that he has flown to him every day on the Amerecan tax payer’s dime and wipe the grease off his mouth with the U.S. consititutien. “Eeny, meeny, miney, mo — which basic U.S. freedoms are next to go?” he say aloud to no one and every one at the same time. Then he flash that trade mark Bary Obame million doller grin as a crack of lightning sound in the distance.”
  • 153. 155 @SEINFELD2000 STAYS ANONYMOUS BECAUSE HE’S NOT FINANCIALLY WELL-OFF ENOUGH TO REVEAL HIS IDENTITY AND LOSE HIS JOB TO BECOME FAMOUS. Despitemultiplepleasfromjournalists,theCanadianrefusestorevealanything more about his identity other than the facts that he is male and Canadian, in order to preserve the corporate life that makes him money. Anonymity also has broad sweeping economic implications, as well. The collective-turned-company HackerOne gained fame by hacking into 100 of the biggest global companies’ mainframes, and emailing those companies with the discovered security vulnerabilities. Originally seen as an out-of-control vigilante effort, it didn’t take long for Hacker One to go legit, given how clever the business idea was (we hack you for free, and then show you how we did it for a fee). The company just raised a $25MM round of financing.
  • 154. 156 Modern economy flat-out encourages the bifurcation of identity. It’s smart to maintain one job, try out a second job on the fly, and keep a third in mind as a hobby. As previously discussed, this is a world that heaps reward on fast-adapters, and Millennials’ future financial survival will likely at some point be predicated on how quickly they can assume a new personal and/or professional identity.
  • 156. 158 ACLARIONCALLFORACTION Hip hop has continually introduced artists who ignore the current aesthetics of traditional celebrity, and therefore notoriety. Kendrick Lamar, D’Angelo, Kanye West, Common and many others are engaged in a dialogue about the state of race relations in America that’s so eloquent and important, their era of works will inarguably go down in history as one of music’s seminal periods. Of Kendrick Lamar’s landmark new album, To Pimp a Butterfly, The Fader’s Rawiya Kameir said, “God knows how long it will be before any of us fully grasp the stacked meanings, extended metaphors and shrouded complexities of Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp A Butterfly. Definitely weeks, probably months.” “Ain’t nothin’ new but a flow of new Democrips and Rebloodlicans Red state vs. a blue state Which one are ya governin’?”
  • 157. 159 Seats on an Airbus A380 49 81 628 853 African-American Millennials face a political system that has never produced equal rights for all American citizens. To paraphrase a recent speech by President Obama, addressing matters of race is about so much more than policing the language we use, it’s about ensuring the presence of equal opportunity. NUMBER OF BLACK EMPLOYEES AT LEADING TECH COMPANIES
  • 158. 160 Ta-Nehisi Coates’ luminous new book, Between the World and Me, is a letter to his Millennial-aged son. In it he discusses America’s ceaseless history of violence on African Americans, leaving them vulnerable to arrest without cause, poverty, false imprisonment and worse. He reminds us that America is a nation built on stolen land, through the tool of subjugation. Toni Morrison calls the text “required reading,” but her endorsement feels like an understatement once one launches into the first page, and then is sent reeling through Mr. Coates’ depictions of his Baltimore childhood, his education at Howard University, his “mecca,” and the fear for his body that consumes “30% of his brain” at any given time during his adolescence. “I have seen that dream all my life. It is perfect houses with nice lawns. It is Memorial Day cookouts, block associations, and driveways. The Dream is treehouses and the Cub Scouts. The Dream smells like peppermint but tastes like strawberry shortcake. And for so long I have wanted to escape into the Dream, to fold my country over my head like a blanket. But this has never been an option because the Dream rests on our backs, the bedding made from our bodies.” He speaks of The American Dream as just that: a dream.
  • 159. 161
  • 160. 162 IT IS NOT ENOUGH TO CREATE A SHARING ECONOMY TO SUSTAIN OURSELVES IN THE FUTURE; MILLENNIALS MUST TURN THEIR ATTENTION TOWARD THE POLICIES AND POLICING THAT HAVE LEAD TO SUCH A REALITY.
  • 161. 163
  • 163. 165 To think, a mere five years ago, it was expected that at some point every homosexual person was to “come out” to the rest of society, because apparently society was owed that explanation. Now, younger Millennials have gloriously taken the identity and sexuality privileges that Boomers and Gen Xers lost their lives to fight for and are now happily running wild. Without any grand, pained “coming out” explanations, heroes like Miley Cyrus, J.Crew’s Jenna Lyons, Angelina Jolie, Lady Gaga, Amber Heard, supermodel Cara Delevingne freely, (sometimes occasionally, sometimes steadily) date women. Matt Bomer, Billie Joe Armstrong, Michael Chabon, date or marry men. It’s hard to name a star who is an A-list force at the box office who’s not publicly somewhere on the sexuality spectrum. Caitlyn Jenner took the cover of Vanity Fair by storm. Perhaps no one said it simpler or better than late night host Seth Meyers, who put his jokes aside for a moment and commented that he was so grateful to be “living in a time where we are all so happy about Bruce going public as Caitlyn.” Fashion doesn’t get any more beautiful than 2015
  • 164. 166 IN THEIR FUTURE, THE FLUIDITY WILL ONLY FURTHER NORMALIZE AND INCREASE. In the instances of gender and sexuality, the older Millennials are truly learning from the younger ones, many of whom have shed their pretense. Perhaps the first subset of a generation to grow up with ‘out’ pop stars and movie stars of all varieties, younger Millennials have no reflexive memory of unflinching culture fear and disdain for being not-straight. Ever since Lady Gaga roared that she was “Born This Way” and Google placed her atop the Brooklyn Bridge, younger Millennials have not looked back And how lucky we all are, for that.
  • 166. 168 “These joys were so trifling as to be as imperceptible as grains of gold among the sand, and in moments of depression she saw nothing but the sand; yet there were brighter moments when she felt nothing but joy, saw nothing but the gold.” - Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina “Our ancestors learned how to remember, and we will learn how to forget.” - Clive Thompson, Smarter Than You Think, 2013 “Time is an illusion.” - Albert Einstein
  • 167. 169 With special, heightened consideration given to the younger Millennials, cohorts of this generation will have relationships with time that are different to any humans who’ve come before them.
  • 168. 170 With videography and photography made casual and archivable by the smartphone, we have now becomeanationofarchivists.YoungerMillennials will have the very best records of their online lives, given the number of life-chronicling tools that have emerged in the last five years, and will continue to emerge in the next. We will now bequeath our descendants ever-improving digital time capsules of our lives. Last year, T.C. Boyle wrote a story for The New Yorker called “The Relive Box,” in which a widowed man and his young girl slowly become addicted to using their Halcom X1520 Relive Box to relive their favorite memories of life with their now-deceased mom. “[My daughter] was going to bed, and I was going back to a rainy February night in 1982, a sold-out show at the Roxy,” the father says. The bittersweet story could not be a more accurate prediction of the near future. For the time being, we have our primitive time- traveling tools: our Stone Age-era Timehop apps (search your Facebook and Instagram photos from this date, last year, 2 years and 3 years+ ago); our data-gathering, preference-learning devices (Google Now knowing that you love gourmet ice cream and making a recommendation on a trip); the letter-writing site future.me, on which one can write an email to their future selves or a loved one.
  • 169. 171 Some of the most trivial-seeming mobile apps built by Millennials are actually reimagining the way we think about the self over time. Snapchat figured something out that had previously eclipsed the greatest minds in social media: people don’t always want to see themselves in the future. Sometimes people actually like to forget. Maybe we’ll someday come to regret letting all of Snapchat’s disappearing images disappear, but for the time being, the app is serving a vital need Millennials (especially younger Millennials, the more determined life-loggers) have: to live certain moments without the onus of memory.
  • 170. 172 This agita over our own image is nothing new; the act of staring at ourselves has been altering human consciousness for thousands of years. In the 1400s, the invention of the Murano glass mirror was actually a crucial enabler of the Renaissance. As Steven Johnson wrote in his wonderful book How We Got To Now: “[Glass mirrors] set in motion a reorientation of society. […] Social conventions as well as property rights and other legal customs began to revolve around the individual rather than the older, more collective units: the family, the tribe, the city, the kingdom. People began writing about their interior lives with far more scrutiny. Hamlet ruminated onstage, the novel emerged as a dominant form of storytelling, probing the inner mental lives of its characters with an unrivaled depth. Entering a novel, particularly a first-person narrative, was a kind of collective parlor trick: it let you swim through consciousness. […] The psychological novel, in a sense, is the kind of story you start wanting to hear once you begin spending meaningful hours of your life staring at yourself in a mirror.” Snapchat is a meaningful invention because it’s tethering identity to the opposite of a mirror. It’s the first picture or video-based mass social media tool that’s not so overtly, gratuitously about the self—it’s about other people. We send Snapchats to share a sincere happening, to react, to make someone else feel loved, to make someone else laugh. We think primarily about the other, not about the self, precisely because the medium doesn’t lend itself well to self-congratulation.
  • 171. 173 As Millennials young and old, rich and poor imbue their lives with a greater awareness of community’s importance, of living on less, of detaching their self worth from the constraints of a job at a major corporation, it’s only natural that they will completely reconsider not only what the individual is, but how the individual behaves and is remembered.
  • 173. 175 Oculus Rift, perhaps a predecessor to T.C. Boyle’s invented “Halcom X1520 Relive Box,” is about to unleash its powers on the world sometime next year. Interestingly, Facebook competitor Google has begun thinking more democratically about what AR technology could do for the planet by way of its highly affordable AR-riff, Google Cardboard. By using nothing more than cardboard to give any smartphone transformative, reality- augmenting powers, Google has now created a series of educational ‘tours’ called Google Field Trips, intended to allow students to explore the sites and sights they’re studying in history.
  • 174. 176 In James Gleick’s seminal 2011 book, The Information, he investigates the work of Dr. Elizabeth Eisenstein, one of the most futuristic thinkers about time and reality in the 1960s (she was an avid follow of Marshall McLuhan, of course). Dr. Eisenstein concluded that “The past is becoming more accessible, more visible” than it had ever been. As we prepare for augmented reality to begin its trickle-down journey into every home in America, her words could not have been more accurate. Imagine the best, most high definition TV or movie screen you’ve come across, pair it with the best surround sound, and imagine that setup enabling the Millennials of the future to relive the day they adopted their son—with him, now an adolescent, in the room. This is their future. Now amplify that future with smell. Dead Man’s Eyes, a prototype developed by Dr. Stuart Eve, allows archaeologists to add smell to their augmented reality film of the past.
  • 175. 177 “During the Bronze Age the site on Bodmin Moor was a tin-mining village. When Dr Eve held the camera up to the hill (left) a series of huts appeared to make it look like he was exploring the ancient village (right). These reconstructions move and change in real- time as the user moves around the terrain.”
  • 177. 179 The individual, the very story America was predicated on, is shrinking in importance in the eyes of many Millennials. The sharing economy predicates telling a story that’s much more interesting about a collective of people, not an individual person. Television has gone longform, often to explore a myriad of characters who, like Tolstoy’s characters from his masterpiece Anna Karenina, are each a different person in the eyes of every person they meet. Think then of The Sopranos, or of True Detective’s Detective Rustin “Rust” Cohle viewed through the eyes of his partner, Detective Martin Hart, versus how Hart’s wife Maggie viewed him. The stories older and younger Millennials are gravitating toward are lusciously complicated mosaics, not linear stories of individual triumph. Oftentimes the three act structure is completely abandoned; after two thousand years of success, it no longer seems suited to our time.
  • 179. 181 USION And so we will emerge to find ourselves living in an era of digital hippies. Millennials will live, work and thrive in tight-knit communities, untethered from the draconian constraints of a 9-to-5, learning to live on less. The prices of things, Millennials have discovered, are entirely arbitrary. A mortgage doesn’t have to cost $200,000 because Toll Brothers said it should. A home can be built for a quarter of that, and without a long term mortgage. Land can be shared, and isolation avoided. Services can be traded and summer homes can be small communes, with 500 square foot treehouses sequestered around a small pond. Work can be freelance, and span a multitude of industries that ebb and flow, given the year. Craftsmanship can be valued, even deified. School can be of the trade variety, a random and lifelong experience, and not something we heap upon the ungrateful like a 4-year-long quinceanera. Nature can be embraced, not ignored. Love can be love: gay, straight or whatever. Labels can be left to history’s annals. Black lives can be examined and re-imagined, until we no longer have to gather in the streets and cry out that they matter.
  • 180. 182
  • 181. 183 A farcical equality for some or a noble equality for all—that is our generation’s choice. We should not allow the world to come to rest in its current socioeconomic state, wherein, in the words of the Nobel laureate economist Joseph Stiglitz, “A rising tide lifts all yachts.” That is not acceptable. The old American Dream, too often deferred to deserve the privilege of reference, may be dead in its current states, but it will leave behind something better. Something achievable. Something magical. Something worthy of the word Millennial.
  • 182. 184
  • 183. 185