Category: Internet and web

2015: the new ’90s?

 

Salt-N-Pepa are pushin' Geico. They're pushin' Geico real good.
Salt-N-Pepa are pushin’ Geico. They’re pushin’ Geico real good.

Welcome to the Internet of 2015. Which, according to this recent post from The Verge, looks a lot like the Internet of the 1990s.

Writes Verge’s Nilay Patel (@reckless):

2015 will be defined by the Revenge of ’90s Internet: media and tech giants flirting with each other, dominant players throwing their weight around, and portals, portals everywhere.

Google is the new Microsoft, Patel writes. Facebook is the new AOL (“pitching itself to media companies as their savior, just as AOL once did”). Buzzfeed is the new Yahoo, and Apple is the new Sony (which was “a hardware juggernaut in the ’90s,” as Apple has become).

It’s an interesting read, even if Patel did overlook some of my favorite 1990s Internet services with his “_____ is the new ______” analysis. (What’s the new Netscape, for example? What about Prodigy, AIM or Usenet?) It’s also a cautionary tale, as Patel notes that the ’90s were “a decade of excess and mistakes and excessive mistakes” which led to the dot-com crash of the early 2000s, “the memories of which continue to shape the industry today.”

Let’s hope we learn from the mistakes and excesses of the ’90s — not only in the tech world but also in marketing.

Remember all those AOL CDs that landed in our mailboxes? Each week, it seemed, the number of free hours offered kept climbing in a sort of hyperinflation that rendered the service as worthless to consumers, except as miniature Frisbees and drink coasters.

AOL_promotional_CDs_in_Canada

What can we in the higher ed marketing realm learn from the ’90s?

Unfortunately, in some ways, our marketing practices haven’t changed much since the days of Salt-N-Pepa, who are now shilling for Geico in a TV ad practically everyone on the planet has seen by now. So we have no “retro” to fall back upon.

In many ways, we continue to operate like the AOL of the 1990s. So if 2015 truly is the new 1990s, we’re ready.

Friday Five: Millennials (still) rising edition

It’s 2015, but here in Marketing World we’re still obsessing over Millennials like it’s 1999.

If you think these are Millennials, then you haven't been paying attention
If you think these are Millennials, then you haven’t been paying attention

Who knew that the most over-analyzed generation in history was still a thing?

Think tanks and marketers and brands and journalists and brand journalists, that’s who.

To wit:

  1. First up is FastCompany, which never misses an opportunity to flog a trend into the ground. In How Brands Can Attract Millennials Looking for Meaningful Work, published on the magazine’s Co.EXIST site, suggests that “mission-driven” (?) brands consider “non-monetary forms of compensation that they can offer, like a sense of purpose, opportunities for growth, and a quality work culture” as incentives for attracting Millennial workers. Meanwhile, a recent article on Money.com suggests that Millennials increasingly link money to fulfillment. Like many of the rest of us, Millennials probably just want to do meaningful work and be well-compensated for it.
  2. Move over, Baby Boomers. The Millennial Generation will finally outnumber Boomers in the U.S. in 2015, according to the Census Bureau and as reported by the Pew Research Center. This year, 75.3 million Americans will be Millennials, while 74.9 million will be Baby Boomers. Immigration has helped to boost the number of Millennials.
  3. On the news beat, the world of newspapers is still trying to figure out how to get Millennials to pay attention to local news. Neiman Lab reports on how one newspaper, the Charlotte Observer, is trying something new with an online site called Charlotte Five. One strategy of this new push is to publish what the Observer‘s director of digital strategy, Ted Williams, calls “Seinfeld Journalism,” aka “stuff people talk about but isn’t really news,” just as the TV series Seinfeld was described as “a show about nothing.” Hmmm. A news model based on a 1990s sitcom? That could be a winner. (Related: Will Millennials cough up money for media? This report projects that millennials will spend, on average, more than $300 in 2015 for pay TV, $125 on music and $100 on gaming, but only $19 on newspapers.)
  4. Millennials are redefining what adulthood means, says Kim Parker, director of social media research trends for Pew Research Center, in this snack-sized New York Times op-ed. They face economic challenges but are “stubbornly optimistic” about the future.
  5. Social media, from a Millennial’s perspective. An “actual teen” (a 19-year-old college student, on the young end of the Millennial generation) wrote this piece about what teenagers think about social media. It’s insightful if not somewhat predictable: Facebook is “dead to us” but something everyone still needs, like a P.O. Box; Instagram is popular and free (so far) from spammy BuzzFeed quizzes; Twitter seems pointless; and LinkedIn was something “we have to get,” so “we got it.”
  6. Bonus read: Move over, Millennials. We’re so over you.