By Jack Madrid
August 1, 2009

I like to remind my sons that when I was a kid, the only time I got to watch TV was on Saturday mornings, which was the only time cartoons were aired. Aside from being a not-so-subtle reminder to limit their TV hours, this also serves as an opportunity to let them know how fortunate they are to have a seemingly unlimited abundance of choice with respect to their distractions and trivial pursuits. It was during my years running MTV Philippines that this realization struck me – and it struck me hard and often. As the crux of my job was to leverage the coolness of the MTV brand to help our customers reach and tap the Filipino youth market, I spent a lot of my time trying to understand the hearts and minds of Generation Y.

The biggest challenge here was figuring out that this generation, far from being one-dimensional with a commonality and convergence of interests, is composed of a diverse set of tribes, grouped according to their individual tastes in music, fashion and social-sexual affinities. The accessibility of technology along with their love of gadgets (this generation’s toys) has made this abundance of choice possible. This made my task at MTV a complex challenge, as I gradually came to realize that a singular profile for Generation Y did NOT exist. Despite its size and spending power, there was no logical way to analyse, bucket and predict the moves of Generation Y, unlike previous generations.

Unfortunately, not many people in the advertising and media industry seem to fully grasp this, since many of them have been accustomed to categorizing the audience as one mass market. After all, the very concept of the mass market came about during the advent of TV. And in subsequent decades, it was taken for granted, and to believe that “one size fits all.”

WHAT MASS MARKET?

Starting with the age of the remote control, then followed by the proliferation of TV & cable channels, and in the past decade, the Internet, there has been a major shift in the balance of power between the traditional providers and owners of content on the one hand, and the increasingly demanding audience, on the other. The mass market, if in fact, it ever really existed ( was it just a figment of the advertising / media industry’s imagination?) was short-lived and is now history. The sociologist Raymond Williams, in his book Culture and Society, stated “Masses are other people….there are in fact no masses; there are only ways of seeing people as masses.” (And to think that he figured this out and wrote it in 1938 — this was a visionary dude!)
While this fragmentation of media was disruptive to many business models, many advertisers have been reluctant to accept this reality, since many choose to still treat us en masse. And the traditional ad agencies, who charge fees based on bulk buying aren’t singing a different tune. Media owners, whether they realize or not that the value of their real estate is threatened, still spend way too much money in producing content and costly shows, even as they see their “mass market” audience shrinking. We have already seen the demise of many newspapers (even the New York Times is swimming in difficult waters), magazines and radio stations. It is only those who have been able to adapt and complement these assets with online strategies and platforms who have a fighting chance to survive and succeed.

Going back to Generation Y; these guys will be the ones to deliver the final blow in the inevitable power shift. For those of us with Gen Y teens and tweens in our households, we know that they have grown up with PCs and laptops as just another household appliance. Beyond being sources of entertainment, Google / You Tube / Twitter and other online portals serve as enabling platforms which command a dominant share of their free time. Increasingly, we are seeing that this generation likes to create its own content and will only choose to consume what they trust as their own. The operative word is choose.

THE POWER IS CHOICE

Jeff Jarvis, the renowned blogger (Buzzmachine.com) said that it is the mass-based industries who are worried about this fragmentation, since they have been used to controlling the mass market.

Even in my MTV experience with the iconic brand, I began to realize the difficulty of making money through the old-world economics of controlling production, distribution and mass marketing. According to Jarvis, the new media economics require “openness, decentralization, and connectedness through niches – not blockbuster hits.” Making money will be through serving the needs of all our individual niches — the good stuff that we all want AND CHOOSE to consume.

We live in a golden age of the Consumer where we have the power to choose. Sounds good to me – in the words of Mr. Spock, let’s live long and prosper!

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