I’ve been reading The Agitator for years (part of why it’s been such a pleasure to write for this august blog).  But I have a confession to make.  Every time I saw posts like More On Millennials: 6 Ways To Entice Them and Time To Take Notice Of Millennials?, I wasn’t buying.

To clarify, I don’t think we should ignore Millennials.  Generational dynamics are like Max Planck’s comment about science: it advances one funeral at a time.  Millennials will be here after I’m gone, so should not be ignored.

What I mean is that focusing on Millennials as an audience is misguided.

Why?

Even if you were going to ignore yesterday’s post and segment on demographics, age is one of the least predictive.

Looking at Millennials with the belief they act one way or the other as a group is not reliable.  In fact, it would likely be better to look at any other factor than age to get an idea of a person.

This sounds controversial, but let’s take this chart at right as an example.

President Obama’s appeal among younger voters was a significant part of the narrative in the 2008 election.  And yet white Millennials’ approval rating of President Obama is between white Gen Xers and white Boomers.  Non-white Millennial approval is slightly higher than non-white Boomers, but within the margin of error.

So if you wanted to predict whether someone supported President Obama, it would be far more instructive to know someone’s race than their age.  Or, put it another way, a 25-year-old white person is more likely to be like a 65-year-old white person than a 25-year-old non-white person.

In the giving realm, as I mentioned yesterday, the greatest difference between the generations in giving is that millennials are 32% more likely than average to support human and civil rights organizations.  That’s minuscule compared with even a weak predictor like ideology (conservatives are 3X more likely to support religious charities; liberals are 50% more likely to support human and civil rights organizations).

This is because of the substantial differences among Millennials.  Let’s look at more actionable variables for us as direct marketers.  One thing we do know for sure is that Millennials own social media, right?

Right?

Sort of (for now).  They use social media more than other age groups.  However, 11% have no Facebook accounts and 27% use it less than once per week.  And that’s the most used social network.  There’s also a significant age variation within Millennials.  Right now, 85% of Snapchat’s users are 18-35.  But there’s a lot of variation within that.  About a quarter (27%) of 31-35 year olds use Snapchat, compared with almost two-thirds (65%) of 21-25 year olds.

Trying to talk to Millennials as a monolithic group is fraught because of this (and the intragenerational intersections of race, ethnicity, and sex/gender discussed above).  And, as we said yesterday, if there’s more difference within your group than between groups, it’s a bad segment.

Most “Millennial traits” are bull.  For something to be a generational trait, it would have to be something that doesn’t occur in every generation when they the same age and something that does not continue over time (that’s a trend, not a generational commonality).  I have found none of these.

Take, for example, the technological savvy of the Millennial generation.  All the data do point toward greater use of social media, greater use of the Internet, greater mobile use, etc.  But this trend seems to be going in one direction for all generations –up.

Not only are all age groups showing greater technological adaptation, but there is no sign that the 15 and under set (the to-be-named generation that follow the Millennials) will not be even more digitally native than Millennials.  For me, then, the statement “Millennials are the most tech savvy generation” has the same meaning as “the youngest adults are Millennials” — something that will eventually be supplanted.

Other general trends that you may have heard of as uniquely Millennial:

• Millennials prefer cities to suburbs.  Actually, a 25-30-year-old today is less likely to live in a city today than one in 2000.  This is something that is unique to young people, not to Millennials.
• Millennials job hop.  FiveThirtyEight myth busted this one for me here.   Young worker job switching is down from both one and two decades ago.
• Millennials want a trophy for every little thing they do.  IBM did a good study of multi-generations in the workplace.  It found that Millennials were only slightly more likely than Gen Xers to want recognition from their boss and less likely than Baby Boomers to want their views solicited by their boss.  Gen Xers, not Millennials, were the most likely to think that everyone on a team should be recognized.
• Millennials are uniquely socially conscious.  That same study found that Millennials were less likely than their Gen X and Boomer counterparts to want to leave a job to follow their heart or save the world.  Oxford Economics found the same thing here; only a fifth of Millennials said making a difference is important to their job satisfaction.

The things Millennials are said to want are probably generally good ideas.  Greater reporting of impact.  Greater personalization.  Use of addressable media.  Permission marketing over traditional interruption marketing.  Mobile friendliness.

Aren’t these things you’d want to do to a 30-, 60-, or 90-year-old?  Or rather, would you care what age person you reached through your mobile friendly addressable ad as long as that person became a committed donor?

Don’t get me started on the idea that someone born in 1981 has more in common with someone born in 2000 than born in 1980.  Seriously, don’t.

So, in summary:

• Demographics are pretty much garbage for creating audiences
• Of the garbage demographics, age might be the “garbagiest”
• This is in part because Millennials (like all other generations) are so dissimilar from each other, there are significant intragroup differences.
• Millennials don’t have the unique attributes often attributed to them, so you couldn’t monolithically target them with messaging even if you wanted to.
• And the ideas associated with Millennials and giving are more a comment on where donors are going generally.

Or as marketing professor Mark Ritson put it in Marketing Week:

“Clearly millennials as a generational cohort do exist – they are the two billion people on the planet born between 1981 and 2000. But the idea that this giant army all want similar stuff or think in similar ways is clearly horseshit. Similarly, the idea that they also differ from other older cohorts in significant ways is superficially persuasive but turns out to be equally nonsensical.”

Thus, when someone says they want to target Millennials, start by trying to improve your messaging to humans by their interests.  I assure you, regardless of what you read to the contrary, Millennials are human.

Nick