Social Media & Digital Marketing in Singapore

Gen Y Responds When You Don’t Treat Them Like Idiots

Remember my earlier post where OMD treated about 140 students like idiots and thought we didn’t know they were farming for ideas under false pretenses? Well here’s the flip side.

MTV came in after lunch with their execs in regular MTV attire, and gave us a straightforward, no bull$#!t account of what life is in MTV. Talking around with my friends afterwards, the general sentiment that they were the most “genuine” of the three companies that we interacted with that way. No “rehearsed” lines provided by PR or HR, no “dumbing down” because we’re students and they’re execs, and I think that made the difference.

I think the proof showed when many students went up to find out more from the MTV execs after the panel discussion.

I think anyone who was at the earlier panels would know that the crowd largely dissipated once they ended, but people actually had to be ushered out of the room this time. Maybe the “clout” of the MTV brand name is stronger? I don’t know.

Lesson learnt? We may be young, but we know when we’re being treated as proper talent that your company may want to hire, and will respond in kind. Maybe companies want to think “Ahh, undergrads are a dime a dozen, they’ll flock to us anyway. Just show them all the awards we’ve won and credentials we have”. Perhaps that’s true for the masses, but the sensing I get is we want to work with companies we identify with, who recognise that we aren’t a dime a dozen, and we’ll seek out the best companies which treat us as such, and not like we’re a dime a dozen.

(Full disclosure: I served my internship with MTV last week and will be re-joining them on Tuesday on a freelance project. If anything this proves my point because if they truly were faking their panel discussion, why would I go back?)

Tags: Gen Y, idea farming, mtv, mtv asia, mtvasia, omd, omniture, treating students like idiots

Posted in Gen Y | No Comments »

Companies Need To Stop Thinking Gen Y Are Idiots

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

Posted in Poor Practices, Singapore | 10 Comments »