Politicians may have given up on millennials but the media business can’t afford to

Richard Marks, research director of asi, says that the media industry is right to focus on understanding millennials, but when it comes to audience measurement, be careful what you wish for

Both the audio and video industries have millennials under the microscope at the moment, to the extent that the headline of this article may have made you inwardly groan: not another article about millennials?

Bear with me, I may not be headed where you think I am.

Now defining what a ‘millennial’ actually is can be as problematic as the amorphous phrase ‘Big Data’, but let’s keep things simple and agree to use it here as a proxy for those who have grown up in a connected world.

At Media Playground earlier this week teenagers were ‘live on stage‘ whilst millennials were a central theme at the recent asi Audio & Video conferences in Budapest. Meanwhile, as I type, my Twitter feed is telling me that Metro is on stage at the MRG Conference in Poland discussing them (yes, media researchers get around a bit!).

The reason for the current obsession is quite simple and logical. Millennials are exhibiting significantly different media consumption patterns to past generations, particularly in their preference for mobile screens and non-linear video and audio.

The focal point for the media industry is whether their behaviour will become more ‘traditional’ as they get older and their independence is impaired, or whether they will carry these new behaviours to the grave. Billions of pounds of ad spend and media investment will be guided by precisely where the pendulum falls between those two extremes.

Clearly the first ‘post digital’ generation – the digital natives – cannot be expected to magically revert to behaving in the same way as those of us for whom the words ‘terrestrial’ and ‘analogue’ actually have any meaning. Their usage of ‘traditional’ media is already noticeably less than past generations, so a lot of this boils down to one question: Do we become our parents? I pray that the Brexit and Trump carnage has increased the determination of millennials not to do so.

Arguably the first post-digital generation holds the future of the media industry in their hands and the asi conferences reflected TV and radio’s desire to understand and connect with this group. This obsession could be seen as hugely ironic given that the two most seismic events for which 2016 will be remembered happened expressly against the wishes of the younger sections of British and American society.

At the very point the media industry is obsessed with millennials, politics has pretty much decided to ignore them, indeed to effectively declare that progress is actually Not A Good Thing. The future has been cancelled and the past is where it’s at. Let’s Make America Great Again and Take Back Control Of Our Borders.

Now politicians may bleat that the reverse is true: “It’s the Millennials that have abandoned politics, not vice versa. If they don’t vote, that’s their fault.”

Well the obvious response is to ask why they don’t vote in as great numbers as baby boomers and pensioners? In the US, could the fact that the two candidates were aged 69 and 70 – either would have been the oldest elected Presidents on record – possibly have anything to do with it?

Both the Trump and Brexit votes were on a knife edge – 52/48 for Brexit and Clinton actually winning the popular vote in the US. The winning sides had a massive skew towards older voters. Would the results have been different if millennials had turned out in force – and in the UK had the vote been 16+?

The reason I ask this is that the same logic applies to media research and in particular audience measurement. Not only was understanding millennials a theme at the asi conference, but so too was the thorny issue of how to get them to actually participate in research in the first place.

Inevitably there were few millennials in the room in Budapest, but BARB’s Joe Lewis put millennials on the screen via a video ethnographic study that showed they are willing to take part in research provided that the measurement is passive and privacy concerns are addressed.

However there may be a case of ‘be careful what you wish for’. Just as a better representation of younger voters would have had a seismic impact on the political direction of 2016, so too would it have an affect on media measurement.

I have long argued that the better your youth sample is, the more truly representative it is and so the lower will be the audience figures measured as a result. This was certainly the case with readership surveys I was involved in in the pre-digital 90s, as extra efforts to recruit 15-24s would inevitably bring more non-readers into the sample, and it is certainly true in the digital era, when arguably often only the most ‘engaged’ millennials take part in survey samples.

Indeed FinnPanel reported candidly to asi that whilst a test of online radio diaries in Finland was better than paper at reaching young people, the listening levels were 20% lower.

If millennials are less likely to take part in survey research then this further increases the importance of using passive data. As I have highlighted in past columns, there is riotous agreement in the media industry about the need for hybrid measurement systems, blending survey research data from IP and set-top boxes.

The final session of the conference was a panel called ‘Whose Data Is it Anyway?’ Senior representatives from BARB, Facebook, Sky, Liberty Global, CIMM and AGF seemed to conclude that there was indeed a need for common currency measurement. However, less clear was how the data (from social video platforms, satellite and cable) would be made available without also surrendering competitive advantage or falling foul of privacy concerns.

The audio from this session has just been uploaded as a series of podcasts that you can listen to or download at the asi site.

My conclusion?

Don’t get me wrong, I am not arguing that media surveys shouldn’t attempt to get the best possible coverage of younger audiences. We need to have the most accurate picture possible to make vital decisions about the future.

However we do need to ensure that clients don’t fall into the trap of thinking that their youth ratings will increase as a result of investing in better measurement. Higher response rates from the young does not necessarily translate into larger audiences, even if better millennial representation at the ballot box could have saved us from Brexit and Trump.

Richard Marks is research director of asi and founder of Research The Media