Focus on the Fringes: Marketing to Millennials Is Complicated

No business can afford to overlook the biggest generation in history — the Millennials. They make up the largest sector of today’s work force and have unsurpassed purchasing power. This group is expected to have $1.4 trillion in disposable income by the year 2020 with no signs of slowing down.

Here’s the problem: The term “millennial” comprises 80 million young people from ages 19 to 34 in the US alone. Marketers will not succeed if they target the group as a whole. Millennials are the most diverse generation to have ever existed. What does a 20-year-old college sophomore have in common with a 34-year-old in the middle of her career? While there may be certain similarities, there are also important differences. Marketers must think in terms of these segments rather than the demographic as a whole. It’s important to drill down into the millennial generation to come up with the right marketing campaign for a brand.

At iProspect, we know our clients’ consumers better than anyone in the business. In the case of the Millennial demographic, we begin with our proprietary consumer survey, CCS, and supplement our clients’ existing consumer segmentations with detailed insight into their digital and social behaviors. Our goal is to bring media actionability to the existing segmentation studies, audiences, and targets.

CCS is our proprietary, single-source quantitative survey that best defines a client’s most valuable audiences, key insights, and the media channels, context, and content affinities that they are most receptive to. The powerful insights from CCS enable iProspect client teams to target the precise individuals most valuable to the client across TV, out of home, digital display, online video, social and mobile media. CCS is the industry’s largest study of consumer media behaviors and attitudes. It incorporates more than 300,000 respondents across more than 50 countries and 65+ touchpoints, representing 90% of global advertising spending. CCS is unique in its focus on consumers’ digital behaviors and technology use, and it also allows us to customize the questions to meet clients’ needs.

With that, we invite you to explore the data and insights garnered from our research of the complex Millennial generation. We partnered with Digiday on this new infographic to show how the young end of the Millennial spectrum (borderline Gen Z) compares to their peers with a toe over the Gen X line. Find out where their attitudes toward privacy, digital advertising, and new technology align and where they don’t.