Millennials Get It

The first blog writing assignment I gave my student last week was to answer the question, do you consider yourself a Millennial? We watched the CBS News report on this new generation and I asked them to find at least one other reference to Millennials, and link to it in their blog post. You can watch the video here.

Most of them wrote about how offended they were by the negative characteristics being attributed to their generation, so I thought I'd direct your attention to a very positive review of Millennials that was recently published in Advertising Age magazine (and available for a short time on AdAge.com). It's called "Plenty of Skill and Smarts in Class of 2008" by Beth Ann Kaminkow. She writes,

The Class of 2008 already knows a lot of things the current work force is still trying to figure out. They've lived in an online and offline world that makes them comfortable bringing new thinking to agencies that are working to bring their clients' brands closer to consumers. They "get" the idea of convergence -- in media, in technology and in the way people live -- because that's how they live. So we need to be willing to learn, as well as teach and mentor.

So, like it or not, those of you who were born in the 80s and are coming of age in the first decade of the new millennium have been given a label: Millennials. Dreaming up labels for the generations is something the media has been doing since the phrase Baby Boomer was coined, and personally, I think yours is much cooler than that one.

I still like mine best, though; maybe because mine, Generation X, was invented by Canadian author Douglas Coupland.