Exploring Millennials’ Motives in Media Class Preferences: Advertising Implications

Abstract

Millennials have become a preoccupation for marketers, especially as they enter their peak earning and spending life stages. This exploratory study represents a touchstone to the motivations, beliefs, feelings, and behaviors members of the millennial cohort, those born between 1980-2000, exhibited toward three major media classes (print, broadcast, and Internet). Forty-one millennials participated in a series of synchronous online focus groups administered through a learning management system (LMS), or focus group chats (FGCs) for short. This study compares millennials’ views toward traditional media (namely, television and newspapers) against the Internet with an emphasis on perceived advantages and disadvantages of each medium, especially as they relate to millennials’ media class preferences. Support for the participants’ suppositions and expressions of their motives, behaviors, and opinions came by way of their verbatim answers to questions posed by the online focus group moderator. The findings suggest that millennials’ media class choices are influenced by convenience, access availability, time shift issues, and preferences. The participants showed discernable control anxiety about new Internet connected devices (ICDs) and media content sources.