Every time we pull Generation Y out of the memory hole, Gen Y deniers come out of the woodwork to parrot Madison Avenue’s gaslighting against it.
Not that it mattes. Because the establishment sources they cite just end up defining and defending Gen Y.
Frequent readers may remember the AdAge article that blew the lid off the marketing industry’s deliberate decision to bury the Gen Y category.
Here at the turn of the real millennium, trend forecasters and futurists are pondering new ways of cross-marketing to all of America’s biggest consumer groups. First there was the generation of World War II GIs–part of Mr. Brokaw’s The Greatest Generation–followed by the Silent Generation and their kids, the Baby Boomers–the group that cemented generational targeting as a discipline.
Then came Generations X and Y, and now there’s the “Millennial” generation.
There it is: proof from AD 2001 that the terms “Generation Y” and “Millennial” were in use at the same time to describe different cohorts.
But some consumers have such a raging case of Stockholm syndrome that they can’t countenance the hucksters trying to sell them their own childhoods being wrong. So some cite this Wikipedia entry (we could ignore their objection on thsoe grounds alone) as evidence that Gen Y and Millennials are one and the same:
In August 1993, an Advertising Age editorial coined the phrase Generation Y to describe teenagers of the day, then aged 13–19 (born 1974–1980), who were at the time defined as different from Generation X. However, the 1974–1980 cohort was later re-identified by most media sources as the last wave of Generation X, and by 2003 Ad Age had moved their Generation Y starting year up to 1982. According to journalist Bruce Horovitz, in 2012, Ad Age “threw in the towel by conceding that Millennials is a better name than Gen Y,” and by 2014, a past director of data strategy at Ad Age said to NPR “the Generation Y label was a placeholder until we found out more about them.”
Related: Lost Generations
While the above paragraph may seem to confirm the current trend of identifying Gen Y with the Millennials, even a cursory reading reveals some serious problems with that stance. Right out of the gate, it affirms what many Gen Y rehabilitators have pointed out, viz. that “Generation Y” was in fact the common term for the kids immediately following Generation X. It also supports the recollection that the Gen Y term held sway for about a decade until the early aughts. What’s more, even Wikipedia has to acknowledge that the decision to retire “Gen Y” was made by advertisers and the mainstream media for marketing reasons, not sound demographic modeling.
This clip from the animated sitcom Mission Hill (1999-2002) illustrates that exact scenario. See for yourself:
But there’s an even bigger hole in Wikipedia-based argument against Gen Y. And it comes from William Strauss of Strauss and Howe fame—also the co-author of Millennials Rising, who also helped coin the term “Millennial”—himself.
“Generation Y was a [popular phrase] in 1993, a term which at that point identified correctly the last third of Gen X,” Mr. Strauss said. “The notion has become familiar in popular culture and in marketing to refer to teenagers. But now Y is a little older-those marketing styles are either directed at current young twenty-somethings or they’re applying the veneer of X to a short-lived effort to reach teenagers that is not going to work over time.” Understanding the new generation as its own animal is key to reaching its members successfully, Mr. Strauss said.
Defining the Millennials as the generation born in or after 1982, Mr. Strauss calls them more numerous, more affluent, better educated and more ethnically diverse than generations past. Millennials also have been trained to be “doers” and “achievers.”
Related: Marketing Millennials
So William Strauss, a demographer quoted in a Wikipedia entry that conflates Gen Y and the Millennials, is on record asserting that they’re two separate generations.
“But Strauss also starts Millennials in 1982!” some may still argue. “Doesn’t that line up better with the current start date than 1990?”
The short answer is “It did.”
In 1987 when Stauss and Howe introduced the term, in the year 2000 when they released their book on Millennials, and even in January of 2001 when that AdAge piece was published.
But, as even critics of the Gen Y label affirm, our ability to define different generations develops with time as our demographic data set grows. After all, people’s behavior changes with time. And a couple of major events went down soon after the release of Millennials Rising and the AdAge piece that have since afforded us a clearer perspective.
Related: Gen Y and the Pre-Internet Age
The old adage that adversity reveals character remains accurate. And the major societal upheavals in the wake of 9-11 and the rise of the smartphone revealed widespread behaviors that enhanced our demographic precision. On the whole, folks born between 1979 and 1989 reacted to the paroxysms at the end of the 20th century in different ways than those born later.
Put in simpler terms, the mesure of any demographic model is its predictive value. And a model that lumps people who came of age before 9-11 in with kids who had smartphones in junior high will yield less useful behavioral predictions than one which delineates the two.
There you have it. Arguments intended to debunk Gen Y end up better defining and defending Gen Y.
Almost like it’s real or something.
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