ASD/AMD Marketplace - Summer 2008 - (Page 54) Feature: Gen Y Moving to the big screen and big picture, Nielsen Entertainment found that four in ten movie-going youth ages 12–26 identify as “early attenders”, jockeying to see new movies within the first 10 days of release, a rate 20% higher than average. Roughly the same relative percentage rate applies to Gen Y’s overall theater habits, which include taking in 9.5 movies per year and five of the summer 2007 releases. Must-see genres for Millennials include comedy and action adventure, followed by suspense, animation, horror and sci-fi/fantasy. rule. Honesty will be the only allowable policy, because within minutes, vigilant bloggers will have spread the viral word about corporate transgressions. It’s a new age of media and a new generation of challenging consumers with money to spend, a discerning eye, and an electronic neural network that never rests. Reprinted with permission from Nielsen’s Consumer Insight Magazine. For a free subscription to the publication, go to www.nielsen.cmo/consumer_insight Meet the Millennials, one of the most confounding, connected, confident and collaborative age cohorts on the planet. Defining the Gen Y Cohort Defining an age cohort is as much art as science. Philosophical approaches vary. Culture-focused definitions strive to make the group as small as possible to increase cohesion and cultural homogeneity. Economically-driven definitions take the opposite approach, widening the age band to encompass as many people as possible. Spirited consumers Along with sophisticated media consumption patterns comes a more sophisticated palate. By tracking alcoholic beverage purchase behavior, Nielsen discovered that beer consumption dropped 12 percentage points in the 1997–2007 period among consumers age 21–30, with wine and spirit sales picking up the slack. Although the same pattern is evidenced for drinkers over 30, the change was only half as fast for that cohort at 6%. Nevertheless, beer remains the beverage of choice for Millennials. On a dollar basis, beer accounts for 47% of Gen Y alcoholic beverage spending, and on a volume basis, 83% of purchases. Millennials are almost twice as likely as older consumers to purchase imported beers and almost three times as likely to pick up a craft beer. Empirically-influenced definitions look at changes in birth rate or a fixed increment for the period of childhood, typically 17 years. For the purposes of this article, nielsen follows the latter demographic approach, using the end of the baby boom [1964] as the starting point. Under this construct, Gen X is defined as those born between 1965 and 1981, followed by Gen Y, those born between 1982 and 1998, whose members are ages 10-26 today. Because the article draws from multiple data sets, wherever the Gen Y date range differs from that above, the actual date range used will be noted. “Almost eight million tweens, or 40% of U.S. 8-to-12-year-olds, own a mobile phone, and they are significantly more likely to use their mobile device to play games than for other purposes: 34% of U.S. 10-year-olds use their phone to play games; 19% for music and 14% for Internet access.” Source: Targeting Audiences in Mobile Media, by Kanishka Agarwal, Vice President Mobile Media, Nielsen Mobile Immediate needs The big take-away about Gen Y is immediacy. They see it. They want it. They want it customized. They want it now. They text it to their friends. And then they want it changed. Product life cycles will be compressed beyond precedent. Customers will literally design their own products. Aesthetics matter, but environmental considerations 54 Summer ‘08 http://www.nielsen.cmo
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