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Last week Ypulse Youth Advisory Board member Amber Gibson weighed in on whether Pepsi could strike a chord with Gen Y by staying on the bench this Super Bowl season. Today we tap our own Dan Coates, president of Ypulse Insights, for his expert take on the brands that stayed in the game and got it right.

For all of the spots discussed below and more, check out this roundup from Ad Age reg. required.

Super Bowl XLIV: What Ads Scored With Millennial Values?

Sometimes it’s a bad thing to be focused on a single subject, but we couldn’t help but spot some advertisers playing to the values held by Millennials better than others during Super Bowl XLIV.

According to generational experts Neil Howe and Bill Strauss, generations move history along, preventing society from suffering too long under the excesses and mistakes that they perceive being made by prior generations as they come of age.

According to Howe & Strauss, the Millennial Generation (born from 1982-2002) can be described with the following 7 core traits:

- Special
- Sheltered
- Confident
- Team-Oriented
- Conventional
- Pressured
- Achieving

Through this lens, let’s highlight a few ads that clearly aligned with the values of the Millennial Generation:

“Timothy Richman” by Cars.com: In general, the Cars.com ads do a wonderful job of celebrating individual members of this special and achieving generation, while simultaneously offering a service that helps to overcome their fear of failure. The numerous achievements of Timothy Richman are cited, each a little more impressive than the last. For a generation that has been prodded to achieve since birth, the pressure to do well can sometimes seem overwhelming. Cars.com has aligned itself with the pressure to achieve as well as fear of failure, giving Millennials an opportunity to use a web-based service to achieve their (car ownership) goals.

“Parisian Love” by Google: This generation has grown up with Google, a company that is most often cited in our research as where Millennials would like to spend their careers. In a savvy mirroring of life stages, Google has aligned themselves with helping the eldest of the Millennial generation succeed as they chart a global path to achieve the discovery of love and the beginning of their own families.

[Ed. note: Youth Advisory Board member Amber sent her review of the Google ad as well: From a female perspective, the romantic narrative of wooing a French girl was very sweet, with Google Search helping every step of the way. The commercial was great because it was easy to follow and Google's brand was constantly visible. There was no way a viewer would mistake this ad for another brand. It illustrates the convenience of searching on Google with a cute story. I'm impressed. Some may say that it wasn't Super Bowl relevant, but it definitely stood out."]

Fiddling Beaver by Monster: Let’s face it, Millennials have been burned by the Great Recession. Jobs are scarce, internships non-existent and youth unemployment higher than 25%. While the crass and pessimistic worldview exhibited by the CareerBuilder ads falls perfectly in line with where members of GenX are right now, these ads are completely out of step with how Millennials look at the world. The generation that witnessed the election of the first black president, that sees “Hope” as a rallying cry and, despite the downturn, has retained their vision of a better tomorrow would find little in common with the cynical buffoons and the suffering employees that populate CareerBuilder’s ads. Instead, an eager beaver who, despite all of the challenges that being a violin playing beaver must entail, manages through perseverance and belief in their dreams to rise to the top of their art is exactly the kind of message that resonates with Millennials. If you were to show a CareerBuilder ad and a Monster ad to a graduating college student and then ask them where they’d like to place their resume, chances are that Monster’s alignment to core Millennial values would be more compelling to them.

Hard Times by Coke: From a generational perspective, the storyline of this ad aligns perfectly with the team-oriented values of the Millennial Generation. As the G.I. Generation (birth years 1091-1924) and the Silent Generation (1925-1942) that followed came of age, social institutions to protect and serve Americans were created and expanded. Boomers (1943-1960) and X’ers (1961-1981) bristled under the weight of these institutions and the pendulum swung back in the opposite direction. Personal rights and freedoms were seen as more important than the needs of society as a whole. This pendulum has recently reached the other extreme with the excesses of Bernie Madoff, Jeffrey Skilling, et al., leaving Millennials thinking that it might not be such a bad idea to ensure that the entire applecart isn’t brought down by a few ‘bad apples’. In the Hard Times Ad by Coke, we witness an allegorical tale told of how “The Simpsons” Mr. Burns, yet another ‘Billionaire gone broke’ as a result of his selfish greed, has been thrust out of his cold and sterile world of individualism and into the society that is celebrating something other than money. The common folk of Springfield are happily pursuing family, community and, Coke. Abu selflessly offers a Coke to Mr. Burns, who, once he’s been stripped of everything and experiences this simple pleasure, can now reintegrate with society.

In all fairness, many advertisers haven’t woken up to the fact that this generation is unique and see the world quite differently. Meanwhile, some ads did a great job of exploring themes that appeal to all generations, however, expect those that effectively tap into the values of the largest generation in American history to prosper over time.

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About Dan

Dan brings two decades of experience in technology and survey research to the Ypulse team. Based in New York, Dan is a veteran within the online research space. Prior to joining the Ypulse team, Dan was co-founder of SurveyU, drove exceptional growth as Vice President of Sales & Marketing at Polimetrix (acquired in December 2006 by YouGov PLC), served as Vice President of Surveys and Samples at SPSS and was a co-founder of PlanetFeedback.com, an ASP-based consumer affairs portal that rewrote the rules of consumer to business interaction. (PlanetFeedback was merged with Intelliseek and subsequently acquired in January 2006 by Nielsen Buzzmetrics). Dan spent the first decade of his career developing cutting edge research practices and methods on behalf of Burke Marketing, Millward Brown Interactive and the Angus Reid Group, enabling companies to develop online marketing insight.

For more coverage of youth marketing, go to the Ypulse Youth Marketing Channel sponsored by Youth Marketing Connection

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Categorized under: Youth Marketing

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