Companies Need To Stop Thinking Gen Y Are Idiots
June 28, 2008 – 11:48 am | by Daryl Tay
Yesterday I was at the ad:tech conference Future Generation track (for students) and the second session of the day was with OMD, and it was very… scammy.
First they came and they said “We don’t want to tell you what life in an ad agency is like, we want you to live it”. So they broke the crowd of students into groups, gave them a brief about a brand and in-game advertising and sent them off to brainstorm.
Now, I don’t know what companies think, but we’re not stupid. It was so terribly obvious that they wanted to farm for ideas and were poorly disguising it as “live the exciting life of an ad agency!” It would’ve been fine if they said “So we wanna know what the new consumer - you guys - think about putting ads in games. Here are some of ideas, do you think it’ll work?”. You want a 140 people test-group or the ideas of 140 business and communications students? Just say so. Openly.
The best part of it all? After the students presented their ideas/pitches, OMD said “They were all so brilliant, we want to keep them!” and then proceeded to collect the paper on which the pitches were written.
If that doesn’t smell of theft I don’t know what does.
And we’re supposed to want to work for employers like that?
I don’t think so.
Tags: ad:tech, employers think gen y is stupid, employers think we're stupid, future generation track, idea farming, idea theft, omd, Singapore, stop thinking we're stupid
10 Responses to “Companies Need To Stop Thinking Gen Y Are Idiots”
By Mark on Jun 28, 2008 | Reply
Hahahaha, they did that? omg…
By Shannon on Jun 28, 2008 | Reply
Heheh, good pwning of OMD, Daryl! I bet someone in the company thought (s)he was really clever for coming up with that one!
By Daryl Tay on Jun 28, 2008 | Reply
@Mark: Yup they did. Heh.
@Shannon: Yeah I feel a little bad mentioning them by name, but unfortunately they were the only company who did that, so I felt it’s okay to name them.
By Priscilla Tan on Jun 29, 2008 | Reply
Exploitation. tsk tsk.
By Brian on Jun 30, 2008 | Reply
I think you may have the company names confused. Omniture has no relationship with Omnicome.
http://hotjobs.yahoo.com/careers-601616-OMD
By Rich on Jun 30, 2008 | Reply
What does OMD have to do with Omniture?
By 7 Banners on Jun 30, 2008 | Reply
I think OMD is not Omniture (a business analytics company) but Omnicom Media (Not too sure about the D though).
Nothing new though, you can call it scammy, stealing etc. But the chances of the agency using those ideas are almost nil. Its just a sideshow of sideshows.
By Daryl Tay on Jun 30, 2008 | Reply
@Priscilla: You betcha. Tsk tsk indeed. I met Meredith on Friday. She seems nice!
@Brian, Rich and 7 Banners: Thanks for pointing that out! Very poor of me. I have no idea how I made that connection. I guess Gen Y aren’t idiots, but we are easily confused.