Daniel Klein, over at the great Young People For Blog, teases me a little about a panel I was on at Netroots Nation.
The comment that caught my attention though was from YDA’s Tony Cani, who had an interesting, albeit slightly tongue in cheek theory about why Millenials are so progressive, or as he put it “What’s the difference between GenX and the Millenials.”
His abbreviated answer was “1. He-Man 2. Transformers 3. GI Joes” The long version was that when Ronald Reagan deregulated TV, it meant that for the first time toy companies could air 30 minute commercials. These commercial shows, he argued led to a “savier consumer of information because everyone’s trying to sell to us”.
I appreciate some of Tony’s point, in that there is something alluring in making an argument that a national political movement was created by The Masters of the Universe, Optimus Prime and Cobra Commander, but I think he’s wrong that entertainment as advertisement is a new phenomena. Maybe it’s place in TV is, but what is now the providence of TV was once the domain of Radio and Comic Books.
More over, the idea that those show trained us to resist indoctrination assumes that they didn’t work–the giant boxes of ninja turtles, ghost buster and transformers in my basement suggests otherwise. Apparently I even though Pizza was gross looking until I let Michaelangelo make my food choices for me.
If you have seen my larger “why peer-to-peer works” training you’ve heard me talk about those great cartoons, but unfortunately Daniel missed my point. The fact that our generation has been inundated with more advertising than any other generation in American history, starting when we were very young, has nothing to do with making the Millennial Generation so progressive. That is definitely not my point. Besides, I’m pretty sure that Hawk and Man-At-Arms are as conservative as it gets.
Instead, I argue that the constant barrage of advertising on TV since our childhood has changed the way we consume information. The result: folks trying to sell us stuff have to use different tactics than they did to our parents or even older brothers and sisters when they were our age. The reason: we immediately grow skeptical of any message or messenger who we perceive as “selling us something” because we’ve seen it all before. This keeps traditional advertising from working as well on Millennials as previous generations, so if you want to get your message delivered to us - you need to deliver it in a more personal, credible, and peer-to-peer way.
In short, the entire point of my (clearly too cute) mention of the big three cartoons of our childhood is that getting young people talking to each other is by far the best way to move our generation one way or another. Celebrity endorsements, regular campaign TV commercials, and direct mail will either fail all together or need to be accompanied by direct in person contact from people we trust (friends) to succeed.
The “real world” gets this (just look at the way musicians and movie studios get young people who are now wiser and savvier than when they were little kids interacting to sell their products) but the grownup political world is far behind the curve.
So - that is my response to Daniel (I wanted to do a comment on their blog but can’t get my account to verify so did it here instead.) I promise, I don’t think some cartoon we watched as little kids or our ability to fight “indoctriantion” are the reasons why our generation is the most progressive America has seen in 80 years. Though I have to admit, I was pretty seriously affected when Hasbro made a movie to kill off an entire line of Transformers in order to roll out a new product line.
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