VidCon: Millennial Marketing is Here and Evolving

by Alyssa Ramos

If you are even asking yourself what VidCon is, you are already in last place in the digital marketing race. Why should you care? Eh, only because if you or your company doesn’t keep up with it, you’re destined to fail. Oh, but you use social media? You have 10k likes on your Facebook page? That’s nice. You probably bought them and unless anyone is actually ‘liking’ what you post, your efforts are useless.

Digital isn’t the future anymore…it’s now. What happens to awesome things that already exist? They get better. Much better. And VidCon proved that those advancements are already heavily taking place.  Sure, I wasn’t thrilled to hear that

vlogging is the new blogging, but hey, guess who’s starting a vlog next week? This girl who just saw the thousands tweens, teens, and (crazy)parents paying hundreds of dollars and standing in lines for hours to see the YouTube stars that they watch daily. Daily. As in millions of eyeballs watching not just a tutorial on makeup, but also the ten advertisements playing throughout that tutorial on makeup.

Although they gave me an anxiety attack every time they suddenly started screaming and running when they saw a YouTube star, whipping out their phones like selfie-ninjas then uploading faster than I can even unlock my own phone, the younger millennial attendees proved some very good points. Likewise, so did the industry leaders and mega-brands leading the industry panels upstairs.

Oh, and I also got to meet the only YouTube star I knew…Grumpy Cat.

What I Learned from Tween Millennials at Vidcon

1. They have no fear at all, whatsoever. They will run in front of moving trucks to see their beloved YouTube stars.

2. They can use an iPhone better than the majority of people working at Apple.

3. The reason why they love the YouTubers so much is because they can relate to them. They don’t care about actors who are mostly way older than them anyway, they want to feel like they are somewhat similar to the “normal, everyday” people on YouTube.

4. They feel like they can connect with and interact with YouTubers because the majority of them actually interact with them on social media or in their videos.

5. Forget every other social media platform, they are ALL ABOUT VIDEO. I got sneak-Vine-attacked by one of the popular Viners and had to track him down just to show me how to use the damn thing.

6. He also had to explain to me what the word “bae” means that they all use. It means “before anyone else”. Cool.

What I learned from Industry Millennials and non-Millennials at Vidcon

1. They are fully aware that the next generation of marketing lies within digital video and interactive media.

2. Big ‘older’ brands like Disney and Google are so aware of this that they are investing in digital talent (YouTubers), digital staff (millennials), and even buying the big digital companies for billions of dollars (Makers, Fullscreen).

3. Millennials have a huge advantage right now being born in the digital age because almost every company is looking for the next big thing and new businesses.

4. They all use big data (AKA they track what you search for and watch online) to target audiences and prime times for posting advertisements.

5. Everyone uses hashtags for their company. Some of them do not use them properly. The majority of non-millennials have no idea what the purpose of using them is.

6. Even brands like Friskies, Fiat, and Taco Bell jumped at taking the top sponsor spots, and had expos that were solely interactive video based.

So as comfortable as you just became with your social media marketing campaigns…get back to the drawing boards because your audience isn’t going to be reading your posts when they could be watching them.