In the Demo

Growing impatience with generational stereotyping has sparked a critical reexamination of how we categorize and analyze age cohorts. Despite Generation Alpha still being born, that won't stop consultants and pundits from making sweeping predictions about who they will be and laying out dubious prescriptions for how they should be raised. By scrutinizing the motives behind labeling Generation Alpha, the absurdity of predicting the t...

The demographic cliff - a controversial idea that declining population growth will trigger economic disaster. But is it real or just sensationalized clickbait pushed by those with an agenda?

Investment advisor Harry Dent popularized demographic cliff fears in the mid-2000s to sell his financial advice (and a book, of course). From there, it became a favored trope in education, where school administrators - from K-12 to college -...

When the Millennials came of age to enter the workforce (which took nearly 15 years) the media was awash in headlines about how to cater to this powerful new generation. Today, the headlines have turned to Gen Z. Farrah and Adam go deeper than the headlines to reveal that the story is still about Millennials. Reminiscent of the treatment of Gen X, Gen Z is constantly compared to their elders, but worse, many writers and researchers...

In this episode, Farrah and Adam discuss the role and effectiveness of strategy in advertising, including how connected it needs to be to cultural trends, consumer insights, and business realities. And then - they take a deep dive into an article by Richard Huntington in WARC, "The Future of Strategy 2023: Marketing is in desperate need of a reality check" in which he agrees with our premise that generational segments are astrology...

The best advertising reveals something you’ve thought for a long time about a product, service or its users (or yourself!) and presents in an unexpected way. Either for a laugh or some emotional response. Today, we’re seeing advertisers take broad stereotypes of generational segmentations and paste them directly into ads. The results are, um, not great. 

MENTIONED RESOURCES:

• 2024 Lamb: The Generation Gap
• Coinbase: Genera...

Adam and Farrah commence a new season, and in the spirit of the new year, take a look at recent Millennial headlines and found that... nothing has changed, and nothing ever will.

Links:

• Jodie Foster on Gen Z
• The ironic reason Gen Z are ageing faster than millennials — Metro
• The Plastic Surgery Trend Gen X, Millennials, & Gen Z All Agree On — The Zoe Report
• How you wear a scarf can reveal if you're Gen Z or Millennial — New Y...

A special drop in our feed - the inaugural episode of Farrah's new show Cross Tabs, released on Iowa's GOP Caucus day, January 15, 2024.

Host Farrah Bostic (In the Demo Podcast, The Difference Engine) and pal Paul Soldera (Equation Research), set the table for what Cross Tabs is all about: demystifying what polls are and how they work.

Mentioned links:

• Jill Lepore's "Politics and the New Machine" [The New Yorker]
• Jill Lepore's ...

Our special guest for our final episode of the year is our good friend Faris Yakob. He and his wife Rosie are the force behind the consultancy Genius Steals, a nomadic strategic and creative consultancy. Faris is also the author of a book about how advertising works through the lens of the concept of attention. It's called, Paid Attention which is now in its 2nd edition. He has been at a variety of media and advertising agencies th...

We are taking this Thursday off for Thanksgiving, sorry to our non-American listeners! We will be back with one more episode in December before pausing to work on Season 2, which is already under way. Please rate and review us on Apple Podcasts or your podcast app of choice. You can email us with questions or thoughts - adam@inthedemopodcast and farrah@inthedemopodcast.

In The Demo, a podcast about how stories of groups are cre...

Is your generation your identity? What happens when your actual life starts to veer away from the story of your life? In this episode, we take a look at the way some members of the Millennial generation are starting to experience a mid-life identity crisis as they realize that they did in fact become married, home-owning, parenting adults with retirement savings. We examine these "getting older" Millennial narratives and what the ...

Adam and Farrah regroup to discuss what they've learned from past episodes featuring Cindy Gallop, Katy Coduto PhD, and Cristen Dalessandro PhD (find them in the feed!!) about Millennial sex, dating, and intimacy. You know, the stuff you have to deal with before you even get to worrying about whether they're getting married on time and having enough kids!

• Intimacy, relationships, and generational differences. 0:00
• Gender...

Our third installment in a series of episodes exploring the part in between hookup culture on college campuses, and "failure to launch" narratives about Millennials living at home instead of getting married and starting families: those years when you're an adult, working, and figuring out what you want in a relationship (if you even want one).

In previous episodes we looked at the "social sex revolution" championed by Cindy Gal...

We're joined by Taylor Lorenz, author of Extremely Online: The Untold Story of Fame, Influence, and Power on the Internet to talk about how she had a front-row seat to many of the changes in media, memes, and Millennials over the course of her career from tabloid blogger to feature reporter for The Washington Post. We talk about the role of social media, the way incentives for media companies have evolved, how she proved internet c...

We started with headlines from the New York Post and other extremely online publications and our research overall has shifted heavily into the journalistic media narrative arc that has been assigned to Millennials; a group we’re not even sure we would say exists. Now we decided we need to read the most visible and influential books over the past 20 years that coincided with shifts in the story. Up first, Kristen Soltis Anderson’s 2...

The story about Millennials and dating is all about apps, sexting and ghosting - the habits of the toxically online. But it’s not all toxic - it can help people discover how to be intimate and confident in their romantic relationships. Still, real concerns about privacy and security abound. We sat down with Katy Coduto, PhD, an assistant professor of media studies at Boston University and author of the forthcoming Technology, P...

We're starting a mini-series on intimacy. First up, Cindy Gallop is the founder and CEO of Make Love Not Porn. They are pro-sex pro-porn Pro-knowing the difference. It's her personal experience with Millennial lovers that opened her eyes to the challenges they were faced with in relationships. Intimacy has been pushed out of culture, and replaced with a variety of distractions, entertainments and stories. Cindy's direct style makes...

Generalizations can be damaging. In this episode, Benish Shah joins us for a conversation about how marketers, in an attempt to simplify the huge Millennial consumer group, over-simplified them en masse. She looks at how power structures are shaped, people on the margins are held there and others are pushed there by the narrative perpetuated to make it easier to sell things.

Benish Shah is a marketer, builder and advisor to comp...

BREAKING (kidding, sort of). In late May, Pew Research announced they would "only do generational analysis when we have historical data that allows us to compare generations at similar stages of life" after a year-long analysis of their own approach to reporting on differences by generations, and the overall landscape of such content and reporting. This announcement supports a lot of what Farrah and Adam have been circling while co...

The Millennial Myth was created in the late 1990's to help provide context about the coming juggernaut of a generation. As with most stories about huge groups, the narrative held on to broad generalizations and chose odd anecdotes to incorporate, while eschewing other detailed experiences and perspective. Early on, people on the fringes took notice, and have been hanging on ever since. We spoke to author expert on narratives and Fo...