Why we should ignore "Millennials"

The advertising industry has become obsessed with Millennials.

We talk endlessly about how to target them, how to make them feel at home in the working world, about how they behave, how they are different. We treat them like a new genre of humanity with meaningful differences.

You want to know a few things about "Millennials"?

1) They generally have very little money.
The over 50's have 80% of the developed world's wealth and yet we make zero effort to talk to them. Link

2) They hold nothing like the influence that we think they have.
Did Selfie sticks start with teens?
Do the older population end up liking the same artists that the Millennials do?
Did Linkedin / Uber / Airbnb / TaskRabbit / Box / Twitter / Vine / Line ( the list goes on and on) all start with Millennials?

3) It's not a vital time to recruit users into brands.
Do we grow up to be loyal in later life to brands we experienced when we were young?
Did the tastes of the Le Coq Sportif shell suit loving 8 year old self, or the Jaffa Cake devouring, Shed Seven CD buying 13 year old Tom stay that way for long?
The few the brands I now care about ( Rag and Bone, Virgin Atlantic, Design within Reach, Waitrose, Standard Hotels, Sonos, Tesla) have just come to me in the last year or so. This has always been the case, brands change, products change, people change, this is not a cycle that is slowing. Quite the opposite.

3) They are the most fickle audience you can imagine.
Look at how trends used to develop, from Super Mario, to Sonic the Hedghog, Tetris, even a "flash in the pan" like "Second life" was a high plateau that tailed off.

Things don't look like that now, from Angry Birds to Flappy Birds, the Harlem Shake to the Ice Bucket Challenge, we see higher, shorter peaks; how can anyone make money? Remember 'Ello? Secret? Yo? Alex from Target? the month when everyone made Hyperlapses?

If sales were linked to areas under the graph, which they are, fads look hard to make money from. Is there a loom band Billionnaire?

But above all else......what on earth is a Millennial? We've taken the most global, diverse group of people the world has ever seen and bundled them together in nonsensical trends presentations that we all nod in agreement at because we want to make sense of the world.

Human beings are designed to see patterns, design to find order in chaos, we can't live a life with even coming close to accepting that life is random, nonsensical and aysymetical. We try so hard with Myers-Briggs, horoscopes, Feng Shui, myths, superstitions, Tarrot and a million other things to somehow come close to making sense of it all, and it's all total crap. We kid ourselves otherwise.

But it was forgivable, Marketing has been based on finding commonalities and probabilities, indexes and more to forming archetypes, personas, target audiences and a huge array of generalizations.

When we talk about "Millennials" , we are just bringing to life two very obvious things together:

1) Young people.

Half of what we say about millennials is the same stuff that we've always said about a group known as "Young people" . Yes they are more open minded, risk takers, they like music, they are optimistic, left leaning. It's pretty easy to be listening to music, talking about fairness, marvelling at the world when your knees are not hurting and you're not being taxed at 42%. This is how the world has always been. Something attributed to prefrontal cortex development, not the changing world.

2) The world has changed.
People now have less time, they are less patient, having a poor attention span. They use mobile phones a lot, are worried about privacy. THIS IS JUST PEOPLE IN THE MODERN AGE. 50% of what is attributed to Millenials is just people in 2015.

Everything that is written about Millenialls should be destroyed. We should take the same findings and split into .

A) Things that have not changed about people.

B) Things that have changed.

Thinking about marketing in this way is FAR more useful, the unchanging man is fascinating, so is the changing man.