Vice.

By Gonzalo López Martí @LopezMartiMiami

When I started out in this business back in the good ol’ 90s, it could take us weeks, even months to craft and get approval for a four word-long tagline.
Entire teams of senior admen and adwomen would sit down around a table to analyze inane lines of copy.
Clients would belabor for months over the meaning, subtext and anthropological connotations of a futile alliterated soundbite.
Of course, the soundbite under the magnifying glass was going to run on billboards, bus shelters, newspapers and magazines when billboards, bus shelters, newspapers and magazines reigned supreme in the marketing repertoire.
Today, I lead a team of dozens of fickle Millennials cranking out tweet-like musings by the truckload, destined to ephemeral social media lifespans.
Funny thing is, the dozens of fickle Millennials refuse to talk to me.
Human interaction is anathema to them.
They are terminally addicted to their smartphones yet, in their worldview, a phone call, good old conversation, is frowned upon, a no-no, a pesky breach of etiquette, an unacceptable intrusion.
Sometimes I try to bribe them, to buy 20 minutes of their attention by taking them out to lunch to a fancy restaurant.
Another waste of time & money: they just take pictures of their food from multiple angles and stare at their smartphones throughout the entire meal, their thumbs typing who-knows-what at unbelievable speed.
There go millions of years of evolution to develop the opposable thumb.
They communicate in short spurts of text in English, Spanish & espanglish.
Soundbytes (pun intended, wink wink nudge nudge).
Which I curate and subsequently sell to my clients.
Needless to say, my clients rarely bother greenlighting them.
I seldom submit this body of work for their approval and, when I do, they give it a perfunctory look at best.
On their smartphones.
Why would they bother?
Said social soundbites will receive a split second of attention from our target audiences.
The shelf life of these “executions” is minutes.
Seconds.
Welcome to now.
Agencies now need dozens of staff to feed the social beast.
Staff that’s not even staff.
These kids don’t want to work full time.
They could care less about benefits and vacations.
They are contractors and they love it.
Highly scattered geographically as well as mentally.
Particularly in my line of bilingual, bicultural & bicoastal business.
A bunch of jaded “digital natives” who couldn’t be bothered by authority, hierarchy, strategy or any other word ending in y other than technology.
Remember the MTV generation?
This is the Vice generation.
As in Vice.com