The Sit-Down: Jamie Gutfreund

H ow many people … sleep with their phones within an arm’s length of them? Pretty much everybody. Well, for millennials it’s about 90 percent. Which means in this time, in this digitally connected time, technically it’s never been easier to reach them. But it’s never been harder to engage them.

They’re very focused on what we call “Brand Me.”

There are 2 billion people in the world right now between the ages of 18 and 34. … And what [millennials] care about are the brands and the companies and the products that they feel are in service to what they feel is their brand need. Their social currency, their identity. Because the way they communicate on social media is all about relationships.

Photo by: RICH SCHMITT PHOTOGRAPHY

You’ve probably heard this phrase “I am what I share.” But it also is what I watch, what I listen to, what I support.

In the old days, content was something that you just saw or you heard. But now content is something that you also touch. And you touch it right in front of your face and you put it in your pocket, so it’s an incredibly personal and intimate experience.

And as all of these millennials … are walking around with their phones, they are changing the culture, they are talking to people all around the world.

Millennials are traveling all over the world. They are taking their phones with them, they are sharing social media all the time, and it means, as they’re becoming increasingly global, they’re changing the world because they’re the culture carriers. As they engage with more people from around the world, their social feeds are now global.

Has anybody ever seen a millennial alone?

There’s so many of them that one of their big challenges is differentiating themselves, which goes back to this whole idea of social media. So when you’re communicating on social media, and “I am what I share” is part of your motto, you need content. You need content to communicate because you can’t really say I’m doing nothing.

If you … give them content that they can actually share, that’s going to be fantastic because you’re going to become part of their vocabulary, part of their social identity.

We asked a bunch of millennials recently what was their favorite network, and the answer for them was YouTube and Netflix. Anybody used Uber recently? It’s pretty great. Searching for a cab was pretty great. And now we have all these companies that are the Uber of everything. Then there is a dating app. Let’s just say they’ve made that very efficient as well.

They don’t want to feel like they’re just buying things. They feel like they are investing in brands. They are trading their money and their social currency. Which is a big difference. They want, as venture consumers, they want brands to treat them as you would a financial partner.

How does that manifest into sport? Here’s an example. So the [Sacramento] Kings did a really interesting thing this last year. They decided to technically crowdsource their draft. … And it really resonated. It was really an amazing way to engage with their fans.

We call this generation the experience generation. And for them, experiences are so much more important than things. And the more emotional an experience, the more likely it is to be shared.

The same person could be watching “Keeping Up With the Kardashians” and watching “Cosmos.” And the reason they want a broad mix of content and experiences is because it allows them to connect with more people.