Companies Need To Stop Thinking Gen Y Are Idiots
Saturday, June 28th, 2008
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
