“It’s Lit”, A Millennial Marketing report by Google

Google recently published a report on Millennial Marketing called “It’s Lit”. It gives insights into the marketing terminology that works best for teenagers.

In order to create this report, the company collected responses from among 1,100 teenagers in the age group of 13 to 17 years. They were asked to list about 122 brands on the basis of their “coolness”. Now there is quite a bit of controversy around the surveyed lot of teens. First of all, nobody knows if these answers were intentional skewed. Also, it is possible that Google made use of a very small and highly disproportionate group of teenagers to arrive at the results. There is absolutely no mention of the demographics, education, social background and other aspects of the surveyed group to back the truth of the results.

Chick-fil- A is definitely “lit”, says Google

And let’s not forget, the other three “lit” brands on the list: Netflix, YouTube and Google itself. The objective behind publishing this report was to find out what the teenagers in the United States think about various brands. It is routine for the company to publish such marketing insight reports often in order to stoke greater ad buying.

Now if you go by what Google, a rather trusted multinational corporation, has to say about teenage perceptions about brands, Vice, doesn’t really stand to impress. Apparently the media channel which offers news to the younger generation, isn’t perceived as very cool among the target audience. On the other hand, Chick-fil- A is among the coolest brands along with YouTube, Netflix and Google.

The report suggests that Vice did slightly better with the millennials in the age group of 18 to 24 years. Also, this age group prefers In-N-Out over Chick-fil-A and has greater respect for WhatsApp, the messaging app by Facebook.

Weird graphs and redundant definitions

While the report itself might be quite misleading (lacking proper research and relevant insight), the added graphs did nothing to help make it better. They were as amateur as the report itself. In fact, several popular sites have lashed out criticism against Google for putting together something as “intelligence-insulting” as this.

Even though some commonly used millennial jargon has been highlighted in the report with proper definitions, these terms aren’t as new as they once were. Yet again, this is a case of refurbishing old information to forcefully create something new. Not something one would expect from Google, right?

The multinational giant has made quite a bold claim at the start of the report. It says that the objective of this online report is to offer a glimpse of the world through the eyes of American teenagers and what they perceive as cool. The term “cool” here denotes anything that interests these teens and makes them excited. It says that Generation Z is the most informed that’s ever been on the planet till date and whatever Generation Z considers as cool is a reflection of their core values, beliefs and expectations.

That time Mac, our Content Producer, made us yell "It's Lit"...

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