‘Millennials never click on display ads’: how ad firms can keep up

This new, web-hungry generation that is easing into the financial decision-making of adulthood is really challenging marketers to change their process.

“More than anything else, Millennials want to be considered tastemakers,” Michael Jaschke announced to a room of perhaps unhappy members of the Philadelphia advertising industry.

The cofounder and CEO of 48 Bricks, a Princeton-based social media marketing agency, Jaschke shared some generational changes that he admitted the audience might not like to hear. Millennials rely heavily on their existing social networks. They listen to friends and family for brand recommendations before advertisers.

They never click on display ads. Ever.

At a Philly Ad Club panel on advertising and digital technology, Jaschke declared that brands and advertising firms may not understand the core values or wants of their consumers. The uncomfortable truth highlighted the gap between brands and their younger, digital-native audiences — and the need to better understand how Millennials use technology.

Jaschke set the tone for the rest of the event. For the next three hours, notable Philly ad executives addressed the changing media landscape and asked their peers to challenge their industry’s conventional wisdom.

Here are some thing we learned:

• Digital growth is not going away. More people are spending more time online, said Patrick Dolan, EVP and COO of New York City-based Interactive Advertising Bureau. That’s not a bad thing. For example, with 83 percent of Internet users using it to stream video on demand, “That means they’re seeing more ads,” said Dolan.
• Mobile is on the rise. Not only is device ownership increasing, but consumers purchase more tablets than PCs and spend more time on mobile devices than PCs, according to data Dolan presented. “What does that mean for everyone? We’re still trying to figure that out,” said Dolan. “But there’s a huge opportunity.”
• The landscape is changing — metrics should too. Brad Bernard, VP of Digital Media and Analytics at Bala Cynwyd-based Harmelin Media, asked everyone in the room to stand up if they had seen a display ad recently. He asked who remembered the headline to remain standing; many sat down. When he asked who clicked on the ad, everyone left sat down. If clicks are irrelevant considering today’s savvy media consumers, how can advertisers measure success? The focus, Bernard said, should be on meaningful connections rather than transactional ones.
• It’s still about storytelling. Lisa Marie Walls, the VP of Digital Strategy at Tierney, a Center City-based advertising firm, said this: The content comes first, then the brand. That’s sometimes hard for businesses to grasp, she said, but not impossible to accomplish. She points to DayOneStories.com, a beautifully curated collection of stories of what people did on their first day of retirement, created by Prudential. The financial firm is only “lightly branded,” meaning that site visitors spend more time exploring the heartwarming stories of other customers. “And when they’re ready to talk,” said Walls, that’s when they turn to Prudential.