The Myth of Generation M

I've already quoted some notes from the British Library / UCL CIBER report before, but a friend highlighted some areas that put the kibosh on "Generation M" being a particularly Golden Virtual Generation. Here are a few notes from a writeup by Outsell Insights:

The impact of social networking is also not as great as might be expected, at least when it comes to looking for information. While younger users are keen consumers of user-generated content sites like Wikipedia and YouTube, there is a marked age separation between these younger consumers and those actually creating the content (mainly 45- 54s and 35-44s respectively).

The report also performs an enormously valuable task in de-bunking some popular myths about the Google generation (for example, highlighting research from Ofcom suggesting that over 65s in the UK actually spend four hours longer online each week that the allegedly always-on 18-24s).

I'm very pleased about this because I don't think the "Google Generation", or "Generation M" are that different from the other 2/3rd of British homes that are connected to the internet. In the Digital Homes workshop last year we had a number of presentations showing that differences were not as wide as people imagine. At the time I wrote:

......the thing I am left with after this - as I am whenever I look at the demographic thing - is that I just don't understand the focus on youth - there are far less of them, and they have far less money. It's almost as if the entire Ad/Media complex is stuck in a 1960's timewarp when that is where the boomer generation were young, but that big bulge is 50+ now.

The main difference, as Ogilvy's Rory Sutherland implied, is that older people are just far less susceptible to Ads, which is why the yoof are targeted.