We have Adam Conover from TruTV's 'Adam Ruins Everything'. Adam joined College Humor in 2012 as a staff writer and a cast member of College Humor Original. He's also the creator and star of the new TruTV series 'Adam Ruins Everything', which is based on the College Humor Original series of the same name. In addition to writing College Humor originals such as 'Mitt Romney Style', he has appeared in videos for the site's 'Hardly Working' series. Prior to joining College Humor, he was an instructor and performer at the Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre in New York City. He is a stand-up comedian who performs nightly around LA, and he hosts his weekly comedy show 'Fresh Out' at UCB Sunset. Please welcome Adam Conover. Adam: Oh my God, woah, thank you! Thank you for having me. Hello everybody! Hi there! How's it going, are you guys enjoying the conference so far? Are you having a good time? Good. Sorry, I'm trying to do this like a comedy show 'cause that's what I know how to do. Start by dropping my water every time, um, yeah. My name is Adam Conover, I host the show 'Adam Ruins Everything'. Why am I here speaking at this event? I'm not entirely sure. I am a comedian. If you're watching this, getting the sense that "Wait a second, this guy's talking about marketing and generations and Millennials and he doesn't know what he's talking about, this is just some dumb comedian's take on the issue", that's exactly what it is. That's exactly what I'm going to present to you, but that's what they asked me to give. What I was told was that my show is very popular with Millennials, it's based on a web series that was also very popular with Millennials. So maybe I have some insight on how to appeal to Millennials, and I do, but it's not what you might expect because my show is, if you haven't seen it, what it is is it's an educational comedy show in which I dispel common misconceptions about the world in which we live. I puncture your widely-held beliefs that you would rather not have disrupted. We talk about issues like engagement rings are a marketing scam, that's true. They were invented by the De Beers diamond corporation in the 1930s as a way to sell more diamonds. Diamonds are also virtually worthless, as we talk about in that video. The TSA does nothing to prevent terrorist attacks. We're taking our shoes off for no reason, it creates the illusion of security without actually making us more secure. And the hymen doesn't work anything the way you think it does... ...guys in the audience, and also many women, don't know our cultural idea of the hymen is totally at odds with the reality. I won't get into the details. It gets a little biological, but you can watch the episode later. And we back up all of the jokes I make on the show with research and we have a research team that does it for us. So these are the sorts of topics we do, right? So it wouldn't be very on-brand of me... Did I use that right? Okay, good, marketing people... ...if I didn't 'disrupt' this conference by telling you the following: Millennials don't exist. That's right, this is 'Adam Ruins Millennials'. That's the segment we're doing today Now, I'm being a little bit glib when I say that, right? I don't mean that literally 20-year olds don't exist, because if they didn't, who would make our coffee at Starbucks? Babies? I don't know. Those are the only people who would accept those wages, I think, other than 20-year olds. But what I mean more specifically is that this image of a Millennial - this is the current cultural image of the Millennial that we see in the media, right? The lazy, entitled narcissist who lives with their parents, takes photos of herself on her phone, right? This person does not exist. I mean, this literal woman exists, right, but she's modelling for Time Magazine. This is a stereotype. This Millennial also does not exist, and neither does this one. I know a lot of 20-year olds. Not a lot of them stand in front of hand-drawn graffiti of social media jargon, you know? They're not like, "oh man, I love walls! My favourite thing is walls!" You know, they use Facebook but they don't really like it, you know what I mean? They're not like, "Ooh, 'social', that's my lifestyle! Right?" It's not real. And so, if you try to market to this image, you will end up completely alienating your audience because Millennials hate this shit! They hate it! They can't stand it. And the fact is, generations in general don't exist. They're not real things that exist in nature. We made them up, okay? Let's look at the chart of the classic Millennial breakdown. Everyone from 1980 on is a Millennial, '60s to '80s, that's Gen X, '40 to '60, that's Boomers, '20s to '40s, that's the "Silent" Generation... I actually hadn't heard of them before I read this chart.. ... I guess they don't talk about themselves that much. And then we have the "Greatest Generation", which, speaking of narcissism, my god! The "Greatest Generation". Alright. Fine, great, terrific. So now, the horizontal line going up and down, that's based on data. That's the number of people who are alive, who are born in a particular year, right now. This is how it breaks down according to birth year, right? So that's based on real data. The vertical lines, though, those are just sort of slotted in there. Those don't correspond to anything specifically in demographics, you know what I mean? It's not as though every Boomer gave birth to a Gen Xer, gave birth to a Millennial. This is just like an artificial way to divide it up. There are Boomers whose kids are also Boomers, and there are Millennials who have kids who are Millennials. Imagine that right now. There are Millennials with little baby Millennials. It's bizarre. If you look at the demographics, here's what really exists: People! This is an actual generational breakdown, we just got a whole lot of people who are alive at the same time And there's different amounts... varying amounts of them, right? That's what actually exists. A-and the census department themselves say we do not define generations The census bureau does not define generations, right? So, now the thing is generations, right, they are a convenient lens through which we look at the people and the question is how explanatory, how useful is the particular lens we're using, right? So...and you can do it any way that you want And the thing is that the categories that we use tend to reveal our own prejudices and opinions about the people we're describing And so you have to ask yourself: is the description we're using actually helping us to learn or do anything at all, right? So first we might say people born in the early twenties that those are the people that grew up in the shadow of the Great Depression and all that poverty and want and that probably shaped their lives and the way they look at the world Correct, right? I would agree with that but equally true about them is that they're also the generation that enjoys jazz clarinet music Right? It's equally true about them, a lot less useful of a fact, right? People born in the late eighties, you might say, "Oh, there's the people who grew up with MTV" That's the MTV generation. They grew up with music videos.. ..you know, fast movie media, stuff like that. Also true, you might also say, "Well, this is the generation that saw Janet Jackson's nickel...nipple at the Superbowl Also true, less explanato...now I know you're going to say a lot of people saw her nipple Those were the people who were okay with seeing her nipple [Laughter] They were like, we're happy to see the nipple, it's fine. Why is everyone making such a big deal about it, right? This is how we divide it up, like We can divide up these people however we want. How useful is the divisions that we're using, right? So where do our actual divisions come from? Where do the generations that we talk about, you know, where does the idea of millenials, boomers, where are those big ones Where did those come from? The fact is writers invent them to get rich Generation X was coined by Douglas Coupland. He was a novelist in the early 90s He wrote this book...Generation X was a huge bestseller. You can see up in the top there "The book that defined an era" It was very successful for him. He got on the cover of Time magazine And after that, it was like a gold rush Who can name the next generation?! Who's gonna get the name that sticks And as we all remember, there were like dozens of names tossed out there that are just like, you know Rose and fell. There was echo boomers. Remember that one? Sixty minutes apparently was pushing echo boomers with a flip phone, I guess, represented...millenials to them Very clearly a show made by old people Echo Boomers, I guess, because they were echoing the pre..,like the baby boomers, something, whatever The net generation, okay, that's pretty good. The generation that grew up with the internet Maybe we could get some value out of that There was generation Y, as in "WHY?" wasn't the person who came up with this more creative? It was great, but the winners of the big generational jackpot Were these guys, Neil Howe and William Strauss. Who coined the term "Millennials"... ... That was the term that stuck, right? Here them describing that on TV, and also they coined the term, so they got to pick, what they thought differentiated the generation from the ones before, right? So here's there pitch Strauss: Today with the emergent of yet a new generation Babies are to be protected... Howe: And we call them the "Millennial Generation." Conover: Ok, Millennials babies are protected, right? We protect millennials, right? As opposed to previous generations who are just allowed to like, play in open mine shafts... ... and with TNT, right? That's why they were called "Baby Boomers", cause they were always exploding. That's the best joke in the presentation... ...But, look, these guys did it! These guys have made a ton of money! I believe they're millionaires, because they coined the term "Millennials" They founded a firm called LifeCourse Associates which use a visionary blend of social science and history. To interpret the qualitative nature of a generations collective persona To help managers, and marketers leverage quatitative... ... They take a lot of money to do a lot of nothing. In my opinion, that's what they do. I sounded like Donald Trump for a second right there.. .. And they consult for huge firms like, Best Buy, Merrill Lynch, the NRA, and the Coast Guard. And they are very successful, because I know a lot of millennials who are like "Oh yeah! Merrill Lynch is totes on fleek! You know? The Coast Guard is bae, right? [Laughter] Worked out great for them. It's fantastic. Here's the fact generational thinking.. Talking about generations this way, has always been historically reductive and condescending To the people who are being described. The first person to talk about generations was "Hesiod" He was histories first economist, he was an ancient Greek economist.
The problem isn't that the marketing people don't understand that's not what millennials want to see the problem is that marketing people, unless they're in house, are marketing to what the shareholders and CEOs think millennials want to see.
God damn it. Millenials to Snake People got me again.
23 y.o. male- lots of fair points by Adam. Just want to point out Hesiod is misattributed with the quote in the video. There are no instances of this notion in any of his writings. Other than that I loved the video- Gen Xers need to worry more about their $1.5trillion in unfunded pensions than our social media habits.
fucking "um"s killing me.
I used to work for a large company that had a guy from a local personnel company come give us a speech about how to handle people from different generations. There was a lot of the "Millennials are entitled" crap and some stories about interacting with older people at his job that were clearly fabricated.
Thanks guys, I didn't know I had to be a little more slow with my tech support directions when the 80 year old on the phone asked me if double clicking meant he clicked both buttons at the same time.
HOLY SHIT THE HOST IS MY DAD. NO JOKE.
They pay during internships? Oh joy! But in all seriousness I attend a public university which requires 100+ internship hours in order to graduate, so yeah point debunked. They're still entitled according to my sources at Time Magazine.
Wow. I actually just watched a whole video from the front page.
"Uhh"
"Right?"