What Do Millennials Really Want?

Adweek’s Millennial Issue came out this week, and it is full of interesting data on advertising’s current “it” generation.

Adweek’s editorial team took to the streets of New York City to conduct its Millennial Street Survey of 100 young New Yorkers to talk about everything from Tinder to Lena Dunham, but one of the more remarkable details from a media buying standpoint was that television has truly reached the tipping point with this generation — 51% of those questioned did not own a TV, and a full 60% did not watch this year’s Super Bowl!

So what are all of these Millennials doing?  Well, one thing we know for sure is that they’re going to the movies — Millennials make up nearly 50% of all frequent moviegoers according to Nielsen, and they are more engaged moviegoers than older generations.

One of the most interesting things about a generation who grew up with technology at their fingertips is that, just because they can do everything digitally, it doesn’t necessarily mean that they want to. In the Adweek survey, a whopping 80% said that they preferred to read books in print rather than digitally. The same holds true for movies — 72% of Millennials in the 2013 Nielsen American Moviegoer study said they like to go to the movie theater to spend time with their friends and have that immersive big screen experience.  So maybe Millennials are not that different from past generations after all — sometimes you just can’t beat the real thing.