With every online media acquisition, we continue to hear about the importance of Millennials as the golden demographic at which to target internet content. Conde Nasté's purchase of Pitchfork actually purchased the attention of Millennial males. HelloGiggles added Millennial females to the Time Inc. portfolio. Big box content farms proudly tout their ability to reach millions and billions of Millennials, creating loyal spaces and authentic content that 'makes their brand resonate in the online media landscape.
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Lately, a new kind of content has frequently been crossing my path: sponsored content about Millennials targeted at Millennials.Across big box content farms, the desire for brands to reach Millennials with 'native advertisements' identified as sponsored content within the flow of a website is 'just part of doing business now.' Here is how it works: The content farm has a content farmer produce an authentic piece of content, fully engaging a reader. A brand that wants to reach people 'in a meaningful way' can be associated with this engaging piece of content. It supplies much trendier ROI than a standard banner-ad driven campaign. Meaningful equity is passed if the content is viewed as authentic enough.What's more authentic to a Millennial than sponsored content about the continual journey to define the self?Sponsored content isn't any less authentic or compromising than 'unsponsored content,' but the volume of Millennial headline sponsored content clickbait feels inescapable. I've had to ponder my Millennial financial roadmap one too many times. An authentic farm would at least let me know that my hopes of retirement are very bleak.
I'm not sure if Millennials even self-identify as "Millennials." In fact, the generation might be the first to evolve to accept people who identify as being part of a generation in which their date of birth would traditionally disqualify them from being part of. A current twenty-one-year-old can be a babyboomer, and a sixty-three-year-old retirement. Millennials are tolerant across all identifiable identifiers.
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As a Millennial, I self-identify as a mere piece of data. With every webpage I visit, the information my browser sends about me to the content farm helps it acquire value. Call me data. Call me another analytic on a dashboard. I am just one of many in a pitch to advertisers about my regency as a web browser. I am a lost wanderer of content farms, forfeiting my information, crafting unicorns from my interests. Pulling my friends and family into this wormhole with every social share of content.Maybe this is the beauty of the Millennial as more than just a demographical buzzword. The definition is vague, and you can continue to scale the umbrella that covers a definable cluster. It makes Millennial content easier to write. Easier to sponsor. With 'engaging content about Millennials' widely-accepted as entertaining-enough clickbait, it's no wonder it is such a comfortable space for brands to sponsor.
Content farms want the Millennial eyeballs at all costs. This is critical, moving into the next phase of online media where you can't have a small cluster of Millennial eyeballs to keep you afloat. Last week, ESPN shuttered Grantland, which was reported to get around six million unique visitors monthly. If you're going to have a brand that matters, and a staff that is there to make money, they better be pushing you towards the 'hundreds of millions of pageviews monthly' zone.If you can't achieve the necessary audience of Millennials, then you don't have enough Millennials to read sponsored content about themselves. This is the point of online media. Your editorial brand can be leveraged as an asset that your readers trust, even if the content is sponsored. Don't overthink it, you've just created a content farm where the most robust contemporary demographic of content consumers flock regularly. One day, a farm may figure out how to sponsor every piece of content that exists on the internet.Some generations fought in great wars. Others came of age in times of political unrest or meaningful shifts in ways of thinking. At this point, the Millennial generation is defined by sponsored content about ourselves.Life on the Content Farm is a weekly column about internet media written by the last relevant blogger.