FEBRUARY 15, 2026
THE NEXT GENERATION OF HORSESH*T
You'd think that after 15 plus years of hysterical "Millennial" nonsense the ad industry would have learned something. But, of course, the ad industry never learns anything. So soon after the Millennial hysteria abated we were treated to the next magical mystery generation -- Gen Z.
On August 1, 2007, I published my very first blog post. It was called "Aiming Low." It was about advertisers' blind obsession with young people. It opened, "Of all the dumb things that advertisers do, one of the dumbest is aiming their message too young."
In the intervening years, I've become a terrible bore on this subject -- mostly to no avail.
This chart from a Wall Street Journal article shows how one of the most dramatic demographic changes in human history is going on right now - - the aging of the human population.
The chart demonstrates that in 1950 there were twice as many humans under 5 as over 65. Just one hundred years later there will be three times as many humans over 65 as under 5.
But facts never seem to be an impediment to folly. This reality is being completely ignored by the marketing industry and we are still being treated to the same youth obsessed 'generational' bullshit we had to suffer through during The Great Millennial Scare.
To make a point about how stupid the whole 'this generation is different' crap is, I will now insert a quote from Time magazine...
“This generation has no fantasies…today’s youth appears more deeply committed to… decency, tolerance, brotherhood than almost any generation…Today’s young are committed as was no previous generation to redeeming…social imperfections.”
This quote is from Time’s 'Person of the Year, 1967' — Baby Boomers.
Researchers, media, and marketing experts have been selling us the exact same generational twaddle for over fifty years, and we dimwits keep buying it.
Here’s how it works. If you want to be a successful consultant or marketing guru you must first convince the hysterical and the gullible (that’s us!) that things are changing dramatically and we are in dire danger of becoming irrelevant if we don’t understand the new type of human being that is now changing everything.
So every fifteen or twenty years they invent a new generation that’s completely different from the last. They have distinctive, mysterious characteristics that only the deeply connected and erudite (that’s us!) can interpret. It’s all bullshit. It’s astrology. How can you possibly take an enormous component of the population — tens or hundreds of millions of people — and say they all have this or that characteristic? The absurdity is thrilling.
Any clear-minded reading of history tells a simple story: Mostly what changes is gadgets and fashions, not humans.
A few years ago BBH Labs in the UK did a study on "group cohesion" i.e., how similarly a defined group of people behaved. This chart demonstrates that random groups of people born whenever the hell they wanted to are astoundingly more cohesive than any of the supposedly homogeneous 'generations.' In fact, people who eat nuts everyday exhibit about 20 times more similarity in behavior than members of the fabulous Gen Z.
Source: BBH Labs, PUNCTURING THE PARADOX: GROUP COHESION AND THE GENERATIONAL MYTH.
As one of the authors of the study put it, "The truth is that these ‘generations’ are simply random collections of people who share no special connection beyond being born within two decades of each other."
Dear Marketer, before you get all hysterical over the horseshit the hustlers and dimwits are peddling about Gen Whatever, please remember this: There's as much variation within generations as there is between generations.
I published a similarly titled piece five years ago. It has been edited and updated here.