Wiregrass Seniors Magazine May 2018 MAY ISSUE | Page 13

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demographics, and the old adage of comparing
apples to apples.
"In 2010, which is when they did the census, Baby
Boomers were all 45 to 64 years old," Francese ex-
plains. "Now, in order to compare Millennials to the
Baby Boomers, because they're the next boom, you
have to have what? Twenty years. And so in 2010,
Millennials are people between 15 and 34. And then
they work back from there to figure out when they were
born."
If it seems like we're skipping over a generation, that's
because we are. And for the most part, ad agencies
did too. In 1991, Douglas Coupland wrote his book
Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture about
the anonymity he and his contemporaries felt grow-
ing up in the shadow of the Baby Boomers. They were
products of a 10- to 12-year downturn in birthrates
sandwiched between the Boomers and the
Millennials, and although the term stuck with the gen-
eral population, the generation was the wrong size to
matter much to marketers.
It seems unlikely ad agencies will take such a pas-
sive approach again.
"The ad agencies have a mission and an imperative
to bring to their clients news of what’s going on in the
marketplace," Francese says. " And so, inevitably,
they segment the American populations into various
groups. The ne cessity to do that means that they sit
around and they come up with names."
The generation currently being born and growing up—
the term Generation Z has often been used as a place-
holder, though the Pew Research Center recently re-
defined them as Post-Millennials—is just beginning
to acquire consumer value, and will become more
powerful in the coming years. When that happens,
ad agencies will have a perfectly workshopped label
ready to slap on spending reports and style section
columns. Visit www.mentalfloss.com
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