Watch Out! The "Millennials" Are Coming

I was pretty offended a year ago after seeing what I took to be an attack on my generation, The "Millennials" Are Coming, on 60 Minutes.

It then became a major topic on AdAge, a site I follow religiously (I wrote them a scathing letter just for bringing up the topic). The piece had a whole host of belittling quotes. Here are a couple exceptionally bad ones:

"You do have to speak to them a little bit like a therapist on television might speak to a patient," Salzman says, laughing. "You can't be harsh. You cannot tell them you're disappointed in them. You can't really ask them to live and breathe the company. Because they're living and breathing themselves and that keeps them very busy."


"These young people will tell you what time their yoga class is and the day's work will be organized around the fact that they have this commitment. So you actually envy them. How wonderful it is to be young and have your priorities so clear. Flipside of it is how awful it is to be managing the extension, sort of, of the teenage babysitting pool," Salzman tells Safer.

I don't think it would have bothered me so much had I not been juggling a full-time class schedule, an unpaid internship, a part time job and a couple extra-curriculars at the time.

Sure, our generation has its share of bums - but doesn't every generation? I don't think that's what defines us. I think we're better defined by our love of knowledge, constant sharing of information, ambition, individuality, and even the collective sense of humor we've developed that's come to dominate the media landscape. Instead of painting such a bleak picture, I wish they had taken the time to weigh the pros and cons. Had they done that, I think they would have realized that overall, our generation is an intelligent, hard-working group of people, and our future is bright.

Each post from here on out is going to be a discussion of interesting marketing campaigns and their societal implications from the perspective of me, a Millennial (and proud of it).

3 comments:

rachel♥jo said...

This article really bugged me, it still does! Did you get a response from your letter??

Adrienne Waldo said...

No response, but they published it in the print version. I just wanted to make sure both sides of the story were addressed, and they granted me that, so I forgave them :-)

Anonymous said...

you should be offended - your generation is a bunch know-nothing slackers!