Interactive Advertising: Persuasion for a Millennial Audience

If you were born between 1980 and 2000, advertisers want you, even if they aren’t quite sure what to do with you. They call you the Millennials or the Bridgers or by a variety of generational initials: Generation Y (because you follow Generation X), Generation D (for Digital), and Generation M (for Multitaskers). Your Generation X predecessors (born between 1964 and 1979) were challenging enough, with their tendency to videotape television programs and speed through commercials. But you’re even trickier with your TV and video downloads and customized, commercial-free programming. This presents a challenge for advertisers, as well as a wealth of opportunities. They want to reach you, they want to persuade you, and they’re just starting to figure out how.

One strategy they are employing is viral marketing—marketing that takes advantage of preexisting social networks. While viral marketing exists offline (where it is better known as a word-of-mouth campaign), it really blossoms online. Advertisers can produce an advertisement and get it in front of millions of potential customers, provided that you find it funny or compelling enough to forward a link to your friends (Elliott, 2010).

Marketers have also tapped into your generation’s unprecedented technological know-how to get you involved in the advertising process. User-generated content is persuasive on several levels. Contests for user-generated advertisements can boost interest in a product or service, and the ads themselves can potentially go viral. They also lend an edgy, young image to the product being advertised. Converse sneakers, for example, posted user-generated videos on its Web site, which became an online hit, and MasterCard solicits users to create copy for its ongoing “Priceless” campaign (Bosman, 2006). More recently, advertisers have started trolling through public feeds on Facebook and Twitter, looking for posts related to their products or services. A mobile team responds to such posts, delivering palettes of crunchy goodness to cracker-loving Tweeters (Elliott, 2010). Whether these new tricks of the advertising trade will lure in your Millennial dollars is yet to be determined. But until Generation Z comes along, they’ll keep trying.