General Assembly Interview with Michael Lazerow: April 2015

Foreign. Welcome, everyone, to General Assembly. My name is Isabel. I'm on the marketing team here, and we're really excited today to have individuals here. I have Michael Lazro, who's an executive at Salesforce, and then Matt Britton, the CEO and founder of mry. And they are here today to tell us a little bit more about Youth Nation and marketing to the millennial generation. And at ga, we are obviously very fond of the millennial generation. And as a millennial myself, I'm very excited to hear about how you guys. How I should be marketed, too. So with that, I will let you guys take it away.

Well, thank you all for showing up. Thank you for tuning in online. We're live streaming this. And those of you with the phones, periscoping and meerkatting, thank you as well. I'm going to be interviewing Matt. I'm amazed that he wrote a book. I know Matt, and I'm amazed, too. It's not easy for ADHD people to write books, so I want to talk about that, but congrats. Thank you. Matt is someone who is not only one of the best marketers I've ever met, but really one of the greatest guys I've ever met. And your success really speaks for itself. I'm really the first question that I'm going to ask, and then we're going to talk for about 30, 40 minutes, and I'm going to open up to questions. So please get your questions ready. What is Youth Nation? What's the book about? Why did you feel so strongly to write a book? When I think of millennials, I don't think of books, right?

So in running an advertising agency, I think we deal with a lot of major marketers and a lot of major clients. And it's always really shocked me to see the things that are intuitive to me and the things that are intuitive to the millennial generation that are just things that major decision makers at big brands just can't grasp, that they don't actually understand. There are major things like Spotify and Airbnb and Even up until six to 12 months ago, Uber, things that are disrupting industries that decision makers at big companies don't know about. They're on the outside looking in. They didn't grow up hardwired with the Internet in the household. So it's just not intuitive to them. And they're almost a different species than the millennials that they're trying to market to. So what Youth Nation means is that youth culture in the 60s and 70s used to be counterculture young people had to fight against big government, big companies to be heard. They had to stage protests and be ins and happenings because they didn't have social media, didn't have a voice. And now the script has been completely flipped. Not only is youth not counterculture anymore, they're the culture. They're the driving culture. They're the business decision makers that are changing the world. So for companies to be able to succeed moving forward, they need to embrace the principles of Millennial thinking. But the hard part is it's not intuitive to them. So Youth Nation, I wrote it to try to make it a roadmap for people who don't really understand this world to actually try to embrace it so they can become better, market better business people, and not sort of be left in the dust.

So what are some of those key principles that you talk about in the book? I've read the book, especially the back cover, which I have a quote on.

I'm honored to have you on the back cover.

Yeah, no, I appreciate that. But talk about some of the principles that are not only driving youth culture, but really driving kind of the reinvention of American and global business.

Yeah. So one of the main principles is, up until Gen X, it was always about the accumulation of physical goods. It was about buying the car and buying the house. And now it's kind of flipped, where Gen Y, Millennials, Gen Z, it's about the accumulation of experiences. So it's about collecting stamps on a passport versus cars in the garage. And we are living in an experience economy. So brands that want to succeed, even if they're selling toothpaste, need to understand that experience has to be a part of their offering, because it's what young people crave. And you look at Instagram, Instagram is a tool that I think has had more impact on our culture and consumer behavior than any social network. Sure, Facebook changed the way that people communicated, and Twitter changed the way that companies spoke to individuals, but Instagram actually changes the way that people spend money. Instagram makes people do things that they wouldn't normally do. And the reason why is that Millennials are defining themselves through the experiences that they achieve rather than the stuff they own. And those experiences are being shared over Instagram.

And. And they're basically doing these experiences just to get them on Instagram or social media.

I mean, it's funny, I actually have a phrase in the book called diffty, which is did it for the Instagram, which is basically that young people are doing things solely for the ability to actually Instagram them. There's actually a peak in Fremont, California, called Mission Peak, which has obviously been around for a while because it's a mountain, and in the last five years, it's been plagued with overcrowding. You can't park anywhere. There's pollution. Local residents are complaining. The reason why is at the top of Mission Peak in Fremont, there's a pole that you can climb up to and get the ultimate selfie. And all of a sudden, everyone is doing it. So hiking hasn't gotten necessarily better, and the mountain hasn't gotten better, but all of a sudden, it's something that people want to do because climbing that peak allows them to build their brand.

And when you think of how we're living today, I'm not in millennials. It's really 18 to 34.

I think your shoes say otherwise.

I turned 40. These are my favorite shoes. My wife love them for me. And when you look at how not only they're living in social media, but how they're working, and there's, you know, seems to be a disconnect between how we prepare kids, people for the quote, unquote, real world, and the jobs that exist, right?

Absolutely.

All those jobs that used to exist in the hotel industry, you know, are now going away as Airbnb and other kinds of conversations. And how is that affecting college, how we should be thinking about our life?

It's crazy. I mean, I've been speaking at a lot of colleges and universities. I was at NYU yesterday, my alma mater, Boston University, the day before, talking to students. And what's interesting, talking to students about the principles of Youth Nation versus talking to companies, is when I bring up a lot of these principles, the college kids are like, yeah, sure. Yeah, sure. They understand the principles. For them, it's just how to apply it to their career, to marketers. I actually asked a bunch of marketers how many of them, 400 at an ANA conference a couple weeks ago. How many have heard of WeWork, a company which is disrupting commercial real estate? And two people raised their hands. So, again, that's what the disconnect is.

And they're the largest, I think, tenant in New York City.

Largest tenant in New York City. Two people, these progressive marketers of brands, and two people raise their hands. But to answer your question, what I tell college kids is that if you have to rely on being told what to do when you walk into work every day, when you go in, your career, that job will soon be offshored because it can be done. Someone can be told what to Do a lot more cheaply and a lot more productively in Costa Rica or China or India, somewhere else because people are willing to work longer hours for cheaper. So in order for you to succeed, you need to have a specialized skill set. The jack of all trades, master of none is not a type of person that has a skill set that's going to be able to succeed in, in the new economy. You need to go very deep in terms of what you know and how you can apply those things. And if you know how to do Ruby on Rails development, if you know how to do YouTube search engine optimization, if you know how to do humor writing, very niche skill sets, you can take those skill sets and use tools like Odesk and market emptied different people or TaskRabbit or these peer to peer skills and have enviable careers. If you're coming out with a Bachelor of arts and you're kind of just like a jack of all trades, you're not as marketable as a corporate America anymore because they can find those skills elsewhere. And again, they can likely outsource them also.

The jobs just don't exist.

They don't exist.

You grew up in Philadelphia. You're either gonna go to business school or law school. You're then gonna become a junior partner at a law firm and then. Or associate. The junior partner then partner. Those firms don't exist. Right. They don't exist and those jobs don't exist. And so it's not this idea of this free agent nation, it's you have to be an entrepreneur. Entrepreneur and take control of your life in a way that you didn't. Maybe when we were coming out of college.

Yep. And what that's doing is creating massive wealth disparity in this country. So it's almost like the roaring twenties. For the first time since the twenties, 25% of the wealth in the United States is controlled by almost 25%, controlled by 0.1% of the people. So you know, Occupy Wall street was about the 1%, this is actually about the 0.1%. And that's a big problem for our nation. It's going to create lots of opportunities, as it have for people like yourself that understand how to leverage technology and new innovations to drive wealth creation and drive success. But for so many people, they're on the outside looking in. And I travel around business and I go to places like Cincinnati and St. Louis and Detroit, where, you know, it's a completely different world than it is in places like la, San Francisco, Seattle, New York, and you know, the country has a big problem ahead of itself as people move towards the coast, as wealth disparity continues to spread. You know, what is our government going to do? Is our country going to look like Haiti or a country that's completely impoverished and there's few people that live on high hills with gates? It's moving in that direction faster than people think.

Well, I think, you know, the interesting part is cities need to reinvent themselves, just like businesses and people.

That's right.

You know, you look at what happened, it's not the first time we've done this, right? Like, as the steel industry moved out of Pittsburgh, they had to reinvent, as, you know, really, a town about hospitals and diversify there. And I think that's what Detroit's trying to do. A lot of tech entrepreneurs going, they're entertainers, you know, trying to rebuild that city. One of the things that I think we're all dealing with is we live with these phones, right? So the mobile phone has never. We've never seen a technology that we're just addicted to like this. We're with it every day. We sleep with this thing next to our bed. How many in the room have two of them? Raise your hand if you have two devices on you. How many have three? I have a special program down the street for you. But that's changing how we live. And I think one of the things that, as people marketers, that it's forced us to do is realize that live experiences and connecting with people in real life is something that we're craving more and more.

It really is.

You know, we've talked about fear of missing out fomo, where social media, you could see, like, what all your friends are doing. It's a better party. You know, Peter Thiel's talking down the street. Run out and see them because we're boring, whatever, but that's happening. But I'm also seeing this movement toward Jomo, right? Like, the joy of missing out. Like, I am here talking to you because I want to be here, and there's nothing I'd rather do. I'm being serious. But it's making a conscientious decision to live a certain way. And if you're a marketer, there are opportunities to take advantage of that. You go to any of the edc, you know, the kind of these electronic dance festivals, which I've been to, which are incredible. You go to Bonnaroo, you go to Coachella. How do you connect with those fans? I think it's a, you know, huge opportunity.

And we're jumping around here. But you talk about music and you know, I came up with a point in the book that I thought was fascinating, which is in Gen X In the late 90s, early 2000s, if you looked at the top 40 songs, most of them were hip hop. It was Puffy, Jay Z was first starting, Kanye was just starting. And hip hop was huge. And there's a lot of sampled music. And the lyrics in the hip hop songs was about excess and the collection of material items. Cadillac fills, Cadillac fills. That was about the bling bling, the Cristal champagne, all these things. That's what the lyrics were about. And then the financial collapse happened in 2008 and all of a sudden it wasn't so cool to talk about your stuff anymore. And right after that, you start seeing EDM kind of seep into the top 40 list. And EDM isn't. There's not lyrics that are about stuff, there's lyrics that are about love and experiences. It's almost a throwback to the Woodstock days, but with a different sound. And since the EDM revolution has taken over, and it has taken over, there's been this massive resurgence of live experiences. You talked about edc, which is the electronic Daisy Carnival. What's interesting about that is more people go to the EDC in Las Vegas every year that went to Woodstock, which is an event that defined an entire generation.

6 24th City Field, New York.

So this is real. And for brands that want to connect with young people, and it's not even young people, Burning man has 40, 50, 60 year olds that are going to it. The experience craze is here. It's social media and technology fueled, but it is about people coming together and brands need to now rework their ability. I saw a lot of our clients sort of running away from experiential marketing when social media hit because they said it's not scalable, there's no roi. How many people are you going to reach? And now there's a resurgence of the live experience, live events, because that's where people are spending their money and their time. Instead of buying cars, they're ubering. Instead of buying houses, they're using Airbnb and they're using all that savings, the access over ownership trend to go to live experiences and events and travel and those things.

And I just think, you know, you see it walking down the street of New York, right? How many of us just walk with the phone in our face and you know, that numbs kind of our senses. It numbs us as humans. And like you as a business person, as an entrepreneur, as a friend, the ability to kind of be present and connect, I think there's just going to be a huge premium place on that and people's ability to really break through this noise. Like, we don't. If you look at what's going on, there's so much information coming to us, right? Like, I'm not a huge fan of live streaming, but now people are live streaming their lives. You have all the news, you have Twitter, you have everything coming at you. We don't necessarily have, it's my opinion, information overload. It's really, we have this filter failure. And you're going to kind of see connecting in person as the way you filter like what you want. So who you spend time with in person, where you go, what you experience, is how you kind of express who you are.

And wait till the Apple Watch comes out in a few weeks, which I think is going to have a much greater impact on society and culture than anyone's even imagining right now, because the wealth of services and use cases that's going to open up, you know, and the whole notion of taking out your phone won't exist as much anymore because people will just look at their watch. And I think the early reviews on the Apple Watch are coming in and saying that every single notification you have is already opt in. When you get the app, watch it just go off like crazy. But over time, people will understand how to work the settings and the filters and only get through what's important. And, you know, people have less time than ever before, but they have much more connectivity. And talk about data overload. I mean, the Internet of things now, every single product, whether it's a toothbrush or a toilet or your thermostat through Nest is now all data connected. It's all collecting data at all times. The Apple Watch is going to take your pulse, it's going to take your blood sugar, and all of a sudden you're going to have all this data pouring in about every device and your body at all times. So to me, seeing information data about my body and my health is a little bit more important than seeing what Kim Kardashian tweeted, but not for everybody. And the ability to manage all this data that's coming at you as a consumer is going to be hugely valuable in terms of your success and how you spend your time.

Well, I think for those of us who have been building on top of the web for a very long time, we're starting to see the realization of this whole concept of ambient web, which is that the Internet and connected devices just makes your life better, right? So the Apple watch, if it's telling my cardiologist that there's an issue with my heart valve, artificial heart valve, like, that's pretty awesome, right? Like, I don't want to have to worry about that. Like, yeah, the use cases of, like, the web just makes your life better, you know, like, what would your luggage say to you if it could talk, right? It would say, like, I'm lost, I'm lost. Or your best friend is, like, in the gate next to you, or you overpacked. And when you start playing that out for health and travel and finance and just friendships, it's pretty amazing. I think that the amazing thing about this world we're kind of embarking into is it's really the millennials are the first generation that have never experienced life without the Internet. Yep, that's right. If you're 30, I got email at my. I think my sophomore year at Northwestern, graduated in 96. You have to go to the library and type in, like, M Les NWU ACNs 226-26-661 just to see that no one emailed you. And you'd be upset. Now you're upset when people are offended and people do email you. But you look at what's happening with kind of a whole generation that expects always on. On demand. Like, instant gratification isn't soon enough for them. And it's just. It changes fundamentally how you have to market, how you have to serve them as a business.

And it's changing fundamental communication tools, like the telephone, for instance. Sure, millennials have their smartphone attached to their hands, but they don't make phone calls at all. Voicemail, forget about it. I haven't checked my voicemail in three years because 80% of the voicemails I get are from machines and not people. And young people, they just don't use the phone anymore because the phone is a disconnected tool. When you call, you don't know if someone's going to be on the other end. It has a start and end time to it. So it's not ongoing. So it's not like it doesn't work like a story does. You can't have a phone call with more than one person at once. So it's not multifaceted. You can't communicate anything beyond words. You can't use emojis over the telephone or pictures which tell a thousand, if not a million words. So for the younger generation coming up, they just don't see the point of the telephone. They are not making phone calls anymore, which is why Snapchat is exploding. Because Snapchat is explaining, actually has all the benefits of the telephone. Right? Which is that the conversations don't live somewhere online forever. They're ephemeral, they disappear, but you can have all the things that the phone doesn't. So I actually think people think Snapchat, this is a great example. Brand marketers don't understand it. They log into it, they turn it on, they don't know how to use it, and they think it's just a fad. Whether it's Snapchat or another Me Too product, I actually think this form factor of communication is going to be the default de facto way that Millennials communicate forever. And I think that's how companies are going to start to communicate as well, which is just shocking. But it's true. People thought it was an unsex thing or it's much bigger than people think it is.

You know, I mean, typically, things are awful ideas, like, stupid ideas, the worst ideas ever, until they're, like, taken for granted. Right. Like Airbnb. Like, I'm just going to let some random couples spend a night when I'm not there in my apartment. Like, I remember when it came out, I'm like. And I told Brian this at One of the F8 events, early F8 events at Facebook, we had some mutual investors. I'm like, that is a stupid idea. Right, Right. I should have said, like, let me invest.

Yeah.

You know, Uber, you kind of. It sounded like a bad idea. You looked at the app, you're like, oh, that's crazy cool. Right?

Right.

No longer, like, how hard is it to raise your hand on the street in New York?

Right?

Not that hard.

But Millennials adopted Uber again, because before Uber, you had to actually pick up the phone and talk to somebody. I mean, I think that the disintermediation of people for technology is another thing that's driving with Barbell Economy, which I'm getting into. But you go to Duane Reade, you don't need to even speak to a person. You're checking it out.

You don't want to speak to a person.

You don't want to speak to a person. Anything that's getting rid of your ability to. To need to speak to a person allows you to operate more quickly and efficiently. I spoke about. I speak about the Barbell economy, which is happening, which is obviously a byproduct of wealth disparity. It's happening in the country. But what we're starting to see in terms of brands is that companies now clearly, clearly need to pick a lane. You're either a value brand who wins on supply chain innovation, like Vizio that can make a flat screen for $300, or the dollar store that sells things incredibly cheap, or Walmart that wins their volume, or you're a premium luxury brand like Apple or Coach or Michael Kors. But there's really no room for the middle. If you're a brand that's sitting in the middle. If you're a Gap, which is like, not a luxury brand, but it's still a little too expensive for the mainstream, you're lost in nowhere. You look at Target and they were playing in the Walmart game, but then they did the Isaac Mizrahi deal where they tried to go upstream for fashion, and they kind of disenfranchised their value shopper. And now they're kind of in no man's land, where Walmart's lowest prices. Every single day. Every single day. Brands need to pick a lane, and not enough of them are doing it. And especially because millennials, they're not going to spend money on a premium brand of toothpaste, because that's not what they're sharing on Instagram. It's not going to define their brand, right? So that is not a premium category. They're going to buy Nike sneakers, they're going to buy an iPhone. There are certain brands that will help define them. But it's shocking where I still see a lot of brands that are playing in the middle. And that's why the uber luxury space is explained exploding right now, because there's such a new market for that. And there's also a market in the value side.

There's also, you know, we're in a world where we expect our brand, our companies that we, you know, buy from, to be transparent, to do what they say they're gonna do, and maybe a little more. You know, we're supposed to hate companies, right? Like, we all talk about, like, Verizon and like Time Warner Cable, and they don't show up. And we have a long history of bitching about companies in this country, but we're starting to see that shift because of the millennial generation. I think one of the shift is kind of these activist companies that are saying it's not just our job to create shareholder profits, but also stakeholder benefits. Who stood up against Indiana, right? It was business. It wasn't musicians.

It was your boss.

Yeah, it was my boss. But others Like Tim Cook, it was Jeremy Stoppelman. It was a very broad group. But where were the musicians who used to be the ones at the forefront driving that change? It took dollars. And I'll tell you, being at Salesforce and being a mission driven company that gives 1% of our profits, 1% of employee time and 1% of our equity to kind of, you know, to the world, there are nonprofit efforts that being an entity that stands for something, matters to, you know, enlightened buyers and especially younger buyers.

I mean, and there's a reason why, which is since millennials are on their phone, right? Because they're on their phone. Advertising just simply does not work on the phone the same way it does in television, so. Or even with the desktop. I actually make the point in the book that mobile has had a bigger disruption on advertising. From desktop to mobile has been a bigger disruption than from before the web to the web. And the reason why is when the web started, you could just juxtapose an Advertisement Next to ESPN.com, the same way you juxtapose a TV spot next to an NFL game. It was the same strategy. It was advertising based banner. Ads are advertising now on the mobile web, advertising really doesn't work because people are in the news feed, and when they're looking in the newsfeed, it's not the advertising that's going to bubble up. It's content. And content cannot be about a brand's unique selling proposition. Content cannot be 20% more absorbent, 350 horsepower. We have a better color, red. It just can't be. And there's a couple of reasons why it can't be. A, it's not interesting to consumers. B, every product today is incredibly better than every product 15 years ago. The worst car today has technology that a car 15 years ago didn't. So what's differentiating brands? Their stories, the stories that they tell. The stories about social responsibility, the stories about dropping a person from space, the stories about partnerships that you create. Those stories need to be created. And the stories is what gets talked about and what gets shared. And stories are what adds value to people's lives. I mean, in the advertising industry, the whole briefing process needs to be blown up, which is another thing that non millennial marketers don't understand, which is the briefing process shouldn't be what is our product? What's the best thing about it? And how can we create an ad around it? It should be, who is my consumer? What do they care about when they wake up at 6am what are their unmet needs and where the hell does my brand fit in? And if a brand can deliver upon that, then they're offering value, Then they're going to get in the newsfeed, then they're going to reach consumers. And that's a whole different world. And I think social responsibility is a huge part of it.

Let's talk about media and advertising for a second. You had a great interview in the book, which I actually read. I don't read a lot of books. I think it's a big deal that I kind of read this book.

I love it. It just came out. I just got the book today and it's like underlined. Mike is the first person I met at his house. It's already redlined and it's pretty impressive.

So let's talk about BuzzFeed. Right?

Okay.

Because BuzzFeed is a company and I'm biased. Investor in BuzzFeed, friends with Jonah and like love the company and always loved the company, but it was a company that was really poo pooed when it launched, right? It's cat pictures, it's fluff, it's not serious. And a few years later, right, with 180 million people and, you know, 100 million plus in revenue and you know, a feature film like the buzzfeed films, it's kind of proven everyone wrong. And at the same time, it hasn't didn't do anything that kind of 60 Minutes and you know, other shows didn't do like you'd put inside Ayatollah Khomeini's cave right next to kind of inside Marilyn Monroe's closet, right? So you have like the cat pictures and the important stuff right now there's a quote in the book that I really like getting from Jonathan Perlman, who runs the kind of the buzzfeed films out in la, getting your message heard is only as powerful as getting your message shared, which was really their breakthrough. We're gonna program based on what people are sharing, not what we think in this almighty tower like New York Times think is important. And I think that lesson potentially translates to any way you're gonna move forward with in this youth nation we live in.

You're right. I mean, I have chapter in the book is people are brands, brands are people. And what I mean by that is that the shift in power has now gone to the individual versus the company. I mean, if you look at it, Mark Cuban, who owns the Mavericks, has more followers on Twitter than the Dallas Mavericks do. My cmo, David Berkowitz has more followers than my agency does. The individuals are the ones that are actually in power because the individuals are ultimately much more interesting than brands. And the social web is always about individuals versus brands. So for brands to be able to succeed, they need individuals and influencers to talk about them. It's really that simple. And that's who people follow and for everyone. One of the pieces of advice I've been giving this to college students is since people are brands, create a brand out of yourself. Now what does creating a brand out of yourself means? It means be consistent in terms of what are your handles on social media. Be consistent in terms of the value that you provide. What is the thing that you know best that you can provide value to somebody else. And be consistent and stick to it. Be creative, humanize yourself. Be a brand. And people who are brands are people who I hire. I don't look at resumes ever. I've gotten burned by so many Columbia, Harvard, NYU students, non graduates in the room. But if you are, deal with it. But I've gotten burned by a lot of and I've hired people who have went to college you've never heard of. That's been amazing because they know how to build their brand. They know how to break through. And whether you're trying to get hired, trying to get interviewed, trying to get into a college, if you build your brand, you're going to succeed in this world. That's how you're going to stick out amongst the noise.

Amen. Build your brand. So I'm going to go through a few ideas that you outline in the book and give me like 10 seconds on each.

That'll be hard, but I think I do it.

You could do it. Physical retailers will crumble.

It's too expensive for physical retailers. As the real estate costs in cities go up and services like Postmate can deliver anything to you within an hour. And Amazon sending drones around, unless you need it within an hour, most millennials will not go to a physical retailer to get it. And Radio Shack just went out of business. I think so many more are going out of business because Amazon is just killing these companies. And I don't think you're going to see as much physical retailers in major cities very soon. You're going to see them start to go out of business.

Okay, I don't necessarily agree with that one, but good answer. The TV and computer will become one.

I think the TV is going to be replaced by a giant iPad on your wall. Kids already are going up to TVs and try to swipe them. Why? Because companies that create content. Companies that create content are going to want to basically have the power, the content's king. They're going to be distributing it via digital channels. The TV networks are not going to have a role moving forward because the only role of TV networks right now is to curate and distribute content. But the Internet does that for me. So giant iPads are going to hang on the wall. Everything's going to be programmatic. The one thing holding up TV right now in its current form is the National Football League, because that's national obsession. It's by far the number one thing that's watched live amongst male and female audiences. Once they pull their rights from CBS and Fox and DirecTV and push it to a Microsoft, Apple or Google and it becomes digital cord cutting will take mainstream. Apple will make a tv and the TV will change the game the same way itunes change the music.

Yeah, I mean, Apple's just going to buy the Super bowl of $200 billion and say you just have to have like an Apple device to, like, do it right.

Everyone's like, what about.

I think, like, I actually don't think that's going to be TV and computer becoming one. I think the TV and computer is going to be a mobile phone. It happens to be that there'll be some big mobile phones on the wall.

Well, mobile phone, iPad, iPhone, same thing. We're kind of great.

Okay, yeah, I'm going to skip the next one. People will get married later, already happening. And have less children.

Already happening. Being an entrepreneur has become democratized. Anybody now can become an entrepreneur. People are staying in the cities. They're not moving in the suburbs because the news feeds where all the action is. Since people are in cities, they have more options. They have stuff like Tinder, which gives them ultimate options every day. Because of that, people are not in a rush to get married. And because they're staying in cities, real estate costs are higher. So it's more expensive to actually have families. So the stat I had in the book, I think I remember correctly, in 1968, 51% of the people were married, living on their own by the age of 30, and now it's 18%.

Yes. I got married very young. I don't agree with. And oh, by the way, Matt is The chairman of JSWipe, which is Tinder for Jews. So any Jews or Jew lovers? Jason.

I see. Jason House.

I'm also an investor.

Put your hand down, Michelle.

Yeah, I'm also an investor. Vishal. I was going to say that off so, last one I'm going to ask, then we're going to open it up to questions. I don't know if I agree with this one either. But you still want the book.

I did.

Facebook. I only like reading stuff that I agree with. So I'm not reading your next book. Facebook and Google and perhaps Amazon and Apple may all become too powerful and be broken up. That's interesting.

It is interesting. I don't think that these companies can exist with the amount of data, with the amount of cash that they have, with the amount of power they have on areas like media and commerce and technology and areas like privacy and them exist in their current form and grow in their current form. And I still have a free market capitalist system where entrepreneurs and small businesses can thrive. And I think because of that, the government's going to need to step in and actually break them up. I mean, what's the alternative?

Like, okay, Google break up. Like, so they take the.

Well, they would take.

They only deliver the world's information to any device in a millisecond.

Maybe they'll have to create a Google North America and they'll have to create a Google for the emerging markets.

I think they're already doing that. You know, they're realizing global economy, but local laws aren't that clear.

I mean, Amazon is killing mom and pop, period. I mean, they get drones flying over people's heads. I mean, small businesses cannot succeed. And it's like it's changing the fabric of already Manhattan. I mean, forget about it. The amount of Chase and Dwayne Reeds that are happening, every store is gone and you can't exist, which is creating that wealth disparity. It's going to be happening with every single industry. So that's Amazon's impact on retail and commerce. But I think Apple's going to have a similar one on media.

Salesforce is okay though.

I think they're right.

Okay, good. So I'm going to open up to questions, only Good questions.

Cool.

And there's a mic that we're going to take to people online. So why don't we. Okay, cool. Whoever gets the mic gets asked the question. Maybe you could say like where you're like what company or what you're doing when you ask just.

My name is Veena Shetty. I'm currently running a nonprofit called the India center. And I'm in the process of launching a new business. And the, the product that I'm launching is, you know, involves designing posters, T shirts, etc, and I was advised, of course by People to say, oh, you know, the market prices, why don't you go sell at streets, you know, what you call street fair fares, and, you know, 20 bucks and all. And I said, that's not where I want my product to be. And they thought I was stupid. But the question I really wanted to focus on was that by the year 2020, the population of United States is going to be 40% of the population is going to be under 18.

Yep.

So. But 40% will also be senior citizens. So how. Exactly. And another thing you mentioned was that the 1% or 0.1% is that there are people who are very, very wealthy and not so wealthy, but it also not just happening in terms of money, but also in terms of intelligence or education is the extreme difference between people who are very, very bright and people who don't have access to education. So if you could.

So your question is more about access to education.

Both.

Because this split is not just financial. There's a very clear split.

Yeah. And they're interrelated. Right. I mean, I think that. So I write about, actually, General assembly in the book. I write about Skillshare in the book. I write about MOOCs, which is massive online open courses. In the book, which is basically that I think the whole notion of education and higher education is changing. I think that education is going to become online already. Harvard and MIT are having your top professors teach classes online. So I actually think technology is going to enable and empower education to become much more accessible to everybody. Now, obviously, there's going to be the haves and have nots, and there's going to be people that are just born into being much more advantageous and opportunist than other people. But I do think that the ability to access education is going to become democratized. I think that's one good thing about technology, and hopefully that will start to ease the wealth disparity that we're seeing moving forward with the youth coming in.

Oh, okay, Cool. Hey, Jonathan Gardner. I work at General assembly. And not to make this all about education, but you were just talking about this, and it made me think. You both work in technology and marketing.

Yep.

Michael and Matty, what kind of skills do you expect millennials to start developing? You were talking before about millennials building their brand.

Right.

But what kind of skills? What kind of technology skills or design? Design skills. We happen to be in an education environment here, so I thought it might be appropriate.

And I think they fall into two categories, art and science. So I think there's a creative class Right. So going back to the fact that if you have to wait to be told what to do when you come into work every day, it's going to be offshored. But if you, if you mastered an art, if you're creative, if you can play into that side and constantly come up with ideas and innovate, then, then in the creative class, you're going to win and you're going to thrive. Science is about understanding technology. If you are a Ruby on Rails developer right now, forget about the income opportunities you have right now. There's something called code.org, which is teaching kids as young as age 8 to learn an hour of code every week. And Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates are behind it. I think that's amazing. Zuckerberg says that actually the language of code is going to be more valuable in this country than the language of English in 15 years. That's probably right as well. So I think you have to pick a side. Art or science. If you're picking. I'm going to actually study books better than anybody else and actually learn what's in books. And I'm going to be book smart. No, because there's people in other countries that can be book smart as well for a lot cheaper. And I think that that's the direction I would tell people to actually go into.

Hi Matt, I have one question and that is that earlier you talked about the importance of, of live experiences, which I totally agree with. Maybe I'm the oldest person in the room here, by the way. I've spent 40 years marrying brands with.

Stuff, whatever that is.

But. And a lot of it was live experiences. How do you reconcile that with physical retail? Going away when shopping is one of many people's enjoyable live experiences. Experience, especially a shared live experience.

So I think when I say retail going away, it means that the stores actually exist and only service the consumer and actually conducting commerce. So if you look at something like Whole Foods, right? So the Whole Foods in Brooklyn has they grow produce on their roof that's sold in the store. They have windmills in the parking lot that power the store. They have live artists event that go on in the store. Whole Foods is an exception experience app. Going to an Apple Store is an experience. So I think that companies that want to conduct transactions and there are certain categories where you still need to touch and feel, they're going to need to be experience driven. There's also some categories that you always will need to touch and feel like apparel and clothing. But then there's services like trunk Club now that actually are mobile. So they'll have actually trucks that drive around and you can come in and actually get measured and try stuff on. And they'll just go to the hot areas when they actually happen. So, you know, experiences in retail can be the same thing. I think it's called retail payment. That's going to occur. But it can't just be about commerce.

It's also a matter of, it's a matter of like when, not if. Because I think I was a journalism major and luckily I didn't continue with that because we saw what happened there. And so when you look at a whole generation that's born online, lives online, they don't look at shopping as an exception experience.

Right. Like, they look at it as a hassle.

And so if you, if you fast forward it, that may take 20 years. Right. But you're going to start to see whole groups of businesses, I think, going out of business. I'm very bullish on retail. Yeah. I just went to a show last week. Hound Mouth, anyone? How mouth fans at Rough Trade in Brooklyn. Like, you walk in, there's like beautiful records store and then you go in the back and there's like a beautiful like music venue.

That's an experience.

And it was like packed. Right. Energy. We used to have those things in Manhattan, but they've kind of left. That's the future, right? You're not selling like, you're not selling cars, you're selling like inspiration, you're not selling like.

And you're bringing people together.

Yeah, like people crave that, like finding like minded people.

Yep.

Okay. So in a sense, just as a follow up, you're essentially saying that the behavior of directed shopping, which has for a long time been attributed to men more than women, will increase and be.

More.

Equal amongst the gender.

Correct.

Hi, my name is Hillary, I'm a public affairs intern at the United nations. And I was wondering if you agree with Exponential. Last week came out with these 12 subgroups of millennials. And I was wondering if you think our age group is so simple that we fit things like Boss babe or There are these 12 categories and that's it.

I mean, actually one of the chapters in the book is called the End of Demographics because another crazy thing about working on brands now is that brand advertisers are still buying TV space. They're spending 70% plus of their budget on TV. And some buys is targeting the 18 to 49 demographic, which is just crazy in terms of think about the differences in tastes and sensibilities and lifestyles between people 18 and 49. But even within Millennials, I don't think it's age driven. I think that there's a merging of the age they say 40s, new 30s, 30s, new 20s, et cetera. People are doing things and they're not dependent upon their age. It's based upon their interests and, and their interest graph and social graph, which cuts across all ages and cuts across all genres. So I don't even think grouping millennials is actually a category in terms of targeting consumers makes sense anymore. But it's much more sophisticated. It's the furthest thing from a monolithic marketplace. It's a highly segmented, fragmented marketplace. And personalization ultimately is going to rule the day. Data driven personalization. A brand should know you, who you are, what you care about, who you know, and deliver what you want at the right place, right time. And those are the brands that are going to win.

I think you write about this in the book how we Used to be Defined by our Jobs, Right?

Yep.

And that just no longer exists.

My name is Brittany.

I work at PepsiCo as a marketing analyst, digital solutions, and customer sort of thing. I'm kind of a token millennial. Just graduated from college in May and now in this workforce. So I think what's most interesting to me, me, I think a lot of the concepts are pretty intuitive as someone who lives this and sees it every day. But what your thoughts are for the future of business in terms of internally at companies and the friction that comes from millennials in the workplace and having a different level of understanding that their VPs or CMOs may not understand and having that tension when I know an easy answer could be the startup mentality. But there are certain companies like mine that will always and should always be a certain size and have a certain level of hierarchy. So how do you deal with that?

So a couple of things bunch I wrote about this. So first of all, this notion of the free agent economy or free agent society, which as I talked about earlier, more people are going to seek out gigs and projects versus a career path, meaning millennials, because they have the tools and the wherewithal to be able to drive their own income. I think what this means for companies is that labor forces and workforces are going to shrink. Companies workforces are too big right now. And I think what's going to happen is companies are going to shrink their workforces. They're going to be moving into cities. So we're already seeing a lot of big companies now instead of being on corporate campuses and like in purchase, like Pepsi is moving actually back into cities. That's where Millennials are actually living. Having less people work for them and then tap in the free agents to deal with the fluctuation of their business. So I think less people actually going to have full time jobs and work at companies. I think for the people that do seek out full time jobs at companies, you know, in the company's environment needs to be adjusted for the needs of Millennials. Most millennials have side hustles or side jobs. They shouldn't have to hide that. They shouldn't have to flip on their Gmail tab and then when the boss is there, flip to their work email tab. Because the fact is there's so many tools to earn additional income from things like TaskRabbit that I think companies need to embrace that. So the strict non compete, the employment agreements say you can't work on anything else. I actually think should be a thing in the past. I think Millennial employees also want to work at the time and place they're choosing. So I don't think they should have to come into work every day. So we're, you know, at mri we don't have fixed vacation days, we have unlimited vacation days. And once we implemented that, people took less vacation than they did when we had fixed amount of days because they felt like they had to use them. So there's a lot of principles I think big companies can start to apply to make sure that they're retaining Millennials because they're the ones that are hardwired in this way of thinking and they're the ones that are going to ensure that companies like Pepsi are successful moving forward.

And one of the things that is driving kind of retention a lot of big companies is innovation. You want to be at a place where you're kind of building stuff. And how do you, if you look in a Jeffrey Moore type of way of like the four quadrants of a business, from a startup to this is kind of working to like you're milking it to you're sunsetting it. Big companies are kind of like milking these big products. They need to reinvent themselves. You know, Visa, I mean the reason why I read the book is the forward to the book is by CMO or head global head of marketing at Visa. And this guy does like 100 billion transactions a year, right? And he's worried about not existing, about going out of business. So how does he continue to run his business while in essence eat himself? Right.

And that's why I had him write the forward versus somebody like you or somebody who's actually in an emerging business. That's the point. The point is that these old institutional brands that were once seen as impenetrable are now suddenly at risk of being gone in a couple of years. Which is fascinating when you think about it. And it extends every inch Intrapreneurship, which.

You write about in the book, actually does work. Now, five years ago, I would have said, I don't know. But you look at Hulu and what George did at the time at NBC to kind of bring those together to create just a monster or business. You look at how, you know, I'm a big fan. Even before they bought Buddy Media of Salesforce, I really modeled Buddy Media, Office Salesforce. And most companies don't create like $1 billion product, right? Like, so Marc Benioff was like, cloud, we're going to put sales management in the cloud. Then he did it with service, right? Well, customer service. And then with a community product, then with a marketing product. And so how do you, as a big company kind of innovate? I think you infuse the army of Youth nation with people who think differently. Nothing gets in the way more than like, we all think the same. And, you know, that's where I think a lot of the best jobs are going to be.

And so many of these ideas are things like rent the Runway, right? It's an exploding business. It's just renting out clothing instead of selling it. So there's no reason that Gap Inc. Couldn't have done that. No reason at all. Why didn't they do it? Because they didn't actually have the right people who were able to work outside of the right infrastructure to come up with those ideas and launch them. And you're seeing that play out over and over and over again. The fact that Tesla was not invented inside GM or Ford or Chrysler is crazy. But it wasn't. You know, Twitter could have been invented inside Microsoft. The list goes on and on. But the companies are not keeping millennials engaged. And they're not opening up an environment that fosters engage entrepreneurship. And it's not happening.

One of the things that's so awesome about being young is you really don't have that. Like, I couldn't have started like my first business now, right? It's hard with like, I have three kids and like this nation of people who the jobs don't exist, but they're just as fired up as we were and they have the hustle and they have technology and they can communicate with this global audience, you could be weird and find your crew. Right. That's where you're going to see the acceleration of business, that it was still a little weird to be a tech entrepreneur in 1996, coming out of Northwestern. Now everyone has their startups at school, right?

Yep, that's true. The back there, cheap seats.

We have one mic here, and then we'll go back.

I'm Mildred. I am working in marketing at a legal tech startup. And so I really like the idea that experience is very important to Millennials. I myself is going to Coachella next week.

And.

But then also, I've also seen, like, brands like H and M and Sephora, they're trying to insert themselves into these kind of experiences that millennials are trying to go to.

Right.

And it kind of gives me, like, a negative feeling to them. They're, like, intruding my. My unplugging from everything else.

Right.

What would be, like, some good suggestions for you as, like, two brands?

That's funny, because that's. I have the whole thing on.

This is the foremost expert in that. I mean, you were promoting concerts in college at Boston University.

But, you know, intersecting brands is a whole different case. I think it's about adding value. Ultimately, you need to. So if you're at a festival, what are the three things the audience wants there? Power, water, and shade. Right. So can you provide tower water and shade better than anybody else? If so, people won't be annoyed that you're there because you're adding value. So you need to figure out ways where you can actually integrate into the experience. I was meeting with Snapchat earlier today. They have an incredible product where people are posting snaps at festivals, and it's all being aggregated into one large story, and then the brand can be in there. I think it's a huge opportunity for brands to actually enter a story and add value. But ultimately, it's got to be about value add against flipping the script. Who's going to these festivals? What are their unmet needs? What do they care about when they're there? And where does my brand fit in? I mean, if you're a car company, don't put a car out on the side, because no one's gonna hang out and watch your car when Calvin Harris is spinning. It's just not gonna happen, you know? But what can you do to make that experience at Coachella better? And that's how brands need to look at it.

The best at Bonnaroo. The best, which is, you know, in Tennessee, the best activation. I saw was l'. Oreal and I forget which brand brand it was they sponsored like the showers and the shampoo, like, because you're just like smelly, you're like hungover, right. And you go and you like get totally refreshed and it's fully branded and you're trying the product and like nothing better.

And there's content that can come out of that you can spread online and build your brand.

Well, sometimes.

Cool.

Hi.

This one right here.

Associations. I work in educational programming and I'm in charge of marketing and digital media. Okay, awesome. As a millennial, I'm in charge of targeting program to millennials. So some. It was really interesting to hear. I guess some of my thoughts about generation being laid out so clearly and so honestly. And while I do agree with all of them, even at my stop don't even realize all the time. So my question is, in new things, should you address a lot of trends that are happening, happening in North America or even Europe, more developing states. However, sometimes in other continents, Asia, Africa, South America, they're usually a few years, five years or a decade lagging in social connections or technology. So in implementing global programs or creating a global brand, how would you go about tackling that? When there are different levels of millennials?

Right.

So it's funny because when I was starting to write the book, I had a, you know, wrestle with myself in terms of should just be about a global view or a United States view. And the fact is that I haven't conducted nearly enough global business to really be an expert on, on all the differences in the emerging markets and how it's actually should impact brands. So the book is Youth Nation is defined to be in the book as American youth. You're right. In other, in emerging markets, in some ways they're ahead of us. You know, in some places, like Switzerland, the mobile phone adoption is further. In Finland, M commerce is further and other areas further behind. In some areas, the legacy systems of cable or actually wired telephone will never happen. They're just going right to mobile. But it's a whole different. I couldn't answer that now because it's a whole larger thing. Creating a global brand is hard because millennials are not the same here and they're certainly not the same around the world. And that's the best way I could answer it. Thank you. Yeah.

Hi, my name's Greg Buelas. I have an independent production company called GB3 Arts. This may be a little macro. It's not as broad a question as most of the discussion has Been, but you're talking about, you know, the advertising, moving platforms and, you know, the television changing and all of that. And something that I conversation, I have a lot with my colleagues and stuff like that is content creation, marketing, content creation, production values, how this is getting made. I was just curious your insights on that. It's like stuff's happening for cheap. It's, you know, it's expensive.

So I mean, I'll answer a big question with a specific example which is in the social media space, we're actually seeing a huge shift from quantity to quality because social media, especially on Facebook, is now pay to play. So I wrote about the Oreo case study in the book because I think it was transformational in marketing and advertising. But back in the Oreo days, which was only two years ago, shows you the rate of change. What was different is that brands still had organic reach. They could still post things and expect their audience to get it. Now Facebook has dramatically throttled that organic reach. So for a brand to reach somebody, they need to pay. And since they're going to pay, they shouldn't create as much content. They should create higher quality content and put media spend behind it. So I think it's a flight back to quality. It's a flight back to less is more. And Facebook actually came out with research that said it's about frequency, the same way TV is. So you should be able to see the same post over and over and over again, which is in the past it was scrolling, you'd see all different posts. So it's almost becoming. I read an article, I think at Adage last week. Social media is media. It's actually the case now, which is really interesting.

And also you're seeing like, you know, MTV is actually broadcasting their award show in feed where you don't have to go anywhere. You just stay in your crazy feed.

Right?

And I think that's the future. Buzzfeed says they don't care where you experience us. They're producing native content that's just going to live on Facebook. It's not going to link out. They're not going to make any money from it just to build that relationship. And what's interesting about kind of these times is like this book comes out on what, the 21st of April?

420. Now it's a coincidence, I swear.

Yeah, 420, his favorite three numbers and put it to bed a few months ago, two months ago, whatever. There was no meerkat crazy. There's no periscope. This is a book about youth nation and there's been a trend that has gone at least in the Technorati and at least in la, San Francisco, Chicago, New York, pretty big in the time of like saying, I'm done with this book because I can't stand like writing it anymore to like publish. Right. Which is kind of crazy.

It is crazy. And what I kept doing is, I mean, the Wiley was great to work with, but they also hated me because I kept saying, what's the deadline? And I'm like, well, what's really the deadline? No, what is really the deadline? Because when I first submitted it, I remember talking about the super bowl and I talked about the 2014 Super bowl and I'm like, what's coming out in April 2015? That's what about the last Super Bowl? So I remember calling him, saying it was due the morning after the Super Bowl. So I wrote in the audience and who actually played in that Super Bowl? And then I got it back like three weeks later because I got more time. And I updated Snapchat's evaluation and Snapchat's user base because that had changed. I tried to like cram the most current stuff possible, but you can't be current enough, which is, you know, books are hard. I'm writing a book about the future, which is why I tried to talk about macro trends that, you know, Meerkat. Yes. I didn't write about that, but I did talk about individuals, publisher, which is really the same trend. Meerkat is just a manifestation of it. But yeah, big challenge in this medium for sure.

Good evening, thank you for this.

I'm really enjoying it.

I have one question.

So you're talking a lot about the.

Facets of this youth driven culture that's really penetrating or at least driving change for many industries.

Which industry to you do you believe is sort of the most, I would.

Say, unshaken or least impacted by all of these facets that we're seeing. So, you know, you're talking about entertainment, talking about tech.

Right.

Education.

It's a great question. Which one do you see is like impenetrable, that will be the same way now, 10 years from now, 15 years ago than it is now.

They may need to modify some catching.

You know, I can't think of any. I think that there's legacy industries that are going to be the slowest to adopt and the government comes to mind as one of them, which is basically they're going to just ignore all this shit until basically there's going to be a revolution because they can. But I don't see any industry that isn't going to be like you think about the medical field. And now they're dropping pods into third world countries, allow people GE to sit in them and actually get a physical without a doctor being there and saying the data back. So, you know, no legal field. They're offshoring. They're offshoring a lot of legal work and then it's being brought back the next day. The medical field, they're having X rays that are done in Israel by radiologists so they can have a 24 hour cycle. I cannot think of any industry that's not going to be impacted by this.

I think like funeral homes, right?

Maybe funeral homes that you sell. You don't want home is actually it.

I mean you don't want like an app that picks up like a dead body and fires it, right?

Like maybe in the future.

Joining us from maybe in the future.

Like technology is making us live longer and one day we might. I was going to say, like Peter.

Thiel says, we're going to live forever.

So that's optimistic note. So that's going to hurt the part of this.

So I'm really sorry to cut us off, but everyone's had really amazing questions. We are at our time limit, at least for the live stream. I will not speak to whether or not these guys are going to hang out afterwards. But thank you all for coming tonight. This was really fun and we'll hope to do something like this again. So thank you guys, we appreciate it.

Thank you.

Buy the book.