Life Stage vs. Generational Cohorts and the Implications for Strategy

0:00This series is brought to you by Ipsos Creative Fuel. Creative Fuel is strategy research designed to help brands ensure the messages in their briefs to their agencies are something both their audience and agencies can get excited about. With Creative Fuel, strategists and marketers can build confidence and buy-in around the simple, bold, empathetic strategies that creatives need. So if you want to start fueling your next campaign with strategy that really moves the needle, check out Ipsos Creative Excellence and their creative fuel solution at ipsos.com. So I'm excited to have this conversation with a couple of folks today.

0:44Matt Carmichael is the SVP of Consumer Trends Thought Leadership at Ipsos North America. And Lisa Zielinski is SVP Creative Excellence Strategy for Ipsos in the U.S. And we're going to be talking about life stage versus cohorts. And an awful lot of us in the strategy world have mixed feelings about cohorts, Gen Z, Gen Y, Gen Alpha, boomers, millennials, etc. There's been a lot of debate back and forth about the validity of such massive groups of consumers and what those massive groups can represent in terms of strategy. Matt has come up with this really interesting perspective on a slightly different way of looking at it, one that's a little more honest, in my opinion, and has a perspective to it that makes more sense to me as a strategist.

1:39I've never bought into the fact that so many people act the same way, that they behave the same way. So I really enjoyed this conversation. It's a conversation about life stage versus cohorts and the implications for strategy. at the, if you haven't noticed in the description of this episode, and we'll do it also on our website, and you can probably see it here on YouTube. If you're watching on YouTube, we're going to drop in the links for the three reports that Matt is referring to and what this thinking is based upon. So really good short reports that are easy to digest and make, make some strong points.

2:13So you can check those out in the show notes and we can, and on our website and on strategy showcase.com. I wanted to point out, for those of you who are watching on YouTube, you'll see the beautiful, fantastic poster behind me here. It is actually pointing out that we are going to be live at TBWA Chiat Day in Los Angeles. It's Wednesday, October 28th at 5.30, Wednesday, October 28th. We are doing on the spot live at TBWA. You may remember we did this a couple of weeks ago, Johannes Leonardo. It was an absolute blast. And that episode should be out now, or at least a day or two following this episode.

2:57And it was just fantastic. And I would love for you to listen to that and hear that episode. We're doing it again. So what is it? It's basically three strategists, three campaigns, one winner. What that means is that three strategists each come and select a campaign that they love, but they've never worked on. And what they do is they get five minutes to pitch that strategy to the audience. And then the audience gets to ask questions. We get to debate the campaigns. We share the work. System one is there to talk about ad results. Tracksuit is there to talk about brand tracking. And it's a fun, really fun evening that's had.

3:39And at the end of it all, the audience votes on which of the three campaigns or strategists, in essence, wins. and it's done by how loud the applause is. So it's really more about fun and getting the strategy community together as a group of people. It's not a heady topic. We know that. We're just trying to have some fun and get people together. And it was a great success. The three strategists in LA are Tom Sussman, Chief Strategy Officer of TBWA New York, who's traveling in for this. Lee McCann is Chief Strategy Officer for InOcean in Los Angeles area. And Mark Hardy is head of strategy for 72 and Sunny in LA.

4:21They're each picking a separate campaign. Nobody will know ahead of time which those campaigns are. They'll just pitch them, show them, and we'll all have a lot of fun talking about it. It is Wednesday, October 28th at 5.30 to 7.30. You can get tickets on our website at onstrategyshowcase.com under the live tour tab. excited to see you guys there okay so this is my conversation with matt carmichael and lisa zalinski of ipsos about uh life stages versus cohorts and what are the implications for strategy those links will be in the show notes uh enjoy this conversation this book that i'm holding up if you're watching us on youtube you'll see this book it is called rocking the Ages.

5:10And this book, it was by, it was part, it was the Yankilovich group that used to, I don't know if they, I don't even know what happened to the Yankilovich monitor, but I don't hear anything about it. It probably got absorbed by somebody. But Jay Walker Smith and Ann Clorman, this book, Rocking the Ages, came out about 20 years ago. Maybe it's 30 years ago now. But it, in my mind, what actually happened with this book, Matt, was that it ingrained and embedded in a generation of marketers starting freaking 30 years ago, let's say, this idea of population cohorts. And this book actually, you know, focused on matures, boomers, and Gen Xers.

5:54And I read this back in the day. And it was one of those books that I underlined massively as I read through it, I was like, this is sort of marketing currency. And not because, and I wasn't, I don't think I was reflective enough to sort of think through the implications of these massive cohorts. But I bought into it, as did I think a whole generation of client-side marketers. And this idea of everything's about cohorts. And yes, 75 million people behave the same. and we should market the same way to 75 million boomers and 35 million Gen Xers and whatever those numbers were. But the narrative was sort of addictive because it made it all seem very simple and easy.

6:44And it's only as I sort of got to work a little longer in the field that I began to agree with what many people thought, which was, it's impossible that people all think the same. And so I'm curious, like, this idea of cohorts for you, what are your thoughts on where it all started from and what the implications were back then? Well, yeah, I mean, I think you're right that cohorts are sexy and they're alluring and they're nice and simple and they have cute labels, not as cute as they used to be, but we'll talk about that later. and it seems like a nice shortcut that people who are going through the same things can probably be reached in the same ways but that is less and less and less true and it's not to say that there aren't actual differences between one generation another and one cohort another like there are and they are shaped by different effects and different things that are going on in the world different economic factors, different political and socio factors.

7:47Great. But we often confuse those with things that are really life stage changes. And part of that, I think, is because marketers start to pay attention generally to a generation as they start to get into kind of their 20s, right? They start to have a little bit of their own money. They start to have a little bit of their own buying power. And so that's when marketers are all like, oh, I want to know about this. Let's give them a name first, and then let's figure out how to market to them. And then let's write 150 thought pieces on why this generation is different from that generation, and we'll just make this mythology about them.

8:25And then I think we also freeze frame our ideas of that generation in that moment. And so if you go like my LinkedIn, I had one of the AIs generate a version of every generation and what they look like. And I'm like, give me a Boomer and a Gen Xer and a Millennial and a Gen Z. And it did. And they're all flash-frozen in their 20s. You know, the Boomer's kind of a hippie. The Gen Xers look cool, etc. And the Millennial looks like one of the Ryans, but I can never get the Ryans straight. And then I was like, okay, now show them to me as they are. And it did a fairly good job. Like, the Boomer started to look like my silent generation dad.

9:10It was wearing khakis and kind of like a houndstooth jacket because my dad never went anywhere not in khakis. And the Ryan looked like an older Ryan. The Gen Z still looked like a Gen Z because they are still in their 20s. And I will note that the Gen X became this kind of cool looking Gen X mom in like a Nirvana t-shirt and a leather jacket because the Gen X are still look cool because of course we do. but we all still think of them as 20-somethings and we haven't quite acknowledged that like those generations have moved on and so it puts all of these bad ideas in marketers heads and then we don't let go of them as situations change so it's the idea of life stage versus cohort that you, it's like you slide in from experience to experience.

10:00But do any of those fundamental experiences that were true to your generation in their 20s, you carry those with you, obviously, but you can't be marketed to as if you're a 20-year-old. I mean, I'm not sure, I don't think anybody necessarily does that, but there is this sort of stigma, not stigma, but labels associated. Yeah, and when I'm saying things about generations, we think about three things, actually. We think about the life stage, where they are in their life. We think about the cohort effects, the things that we're talking about here, the things that really are different from one generation to the next.

10:33And we also think about the period effects, because there are big transcendent things like COVID or like the economic downturn in 2008 that have an effect on everybody across generations, just differently depending on where they are in their life stage. One of the things I've always struggled with, I think it would be helpful to sort of pull it apart a little bit here, is the idea that you have these shared experiences that you talk to. And I think when you look at these sort of cohort segments, you can see the big things that they're listed as happening and having major influence, some of which you've already mentioned.

11:09So that's the shared experiences. But underneath that, within a specific cohort, let's say it's Gen Z, within that cohort, there's the shared experiences, but there's also the lived experiences. and I'm just curious how much influence should those lived experiences have because those lived experiences are very different for a kid in Kansas City than a kid in New York City than a kid in Florida. They're influenced by socioeconomic factors. They're cultural factors. How do we make sense of all of that lived experience because it's easy to wrap it up into a cohort but But are we able to sort of pull it apart a bit and as marketers begin to understand how we can understand that better to effect?

12:01Yeah, and that's certainly kind of an interesting discussion. So one thing that's going on is that we have more data about everybody than we ever have. We have more tools for customization about everything than we ever have. And we also have more fragmentation than we ever had. so for every generation there were certain like big milestones that happened that are the kind of things that like do you remember when this happened or when that happened like do you remember where you were when you heard that kurt cobain had died or the space shuttle had exploded which certainly hit my generation because we were all watching it in our schools in real time or, you know, when this war ended or any of a number of events like that.

12:48And those are big milestones culturally that are worth, you know, noting and such. But also, now with so much more entertainment and so much more media, it is so much harder to find those things that could tie together a generation as having at least a couple common touch points here and there. And at the same time, like, We have all of these tools to be able to segment the audience as narrowly as you want to and start to communicate to them more directly and more specifically based on things that they care about and the fandoms they are a part of. And the pieces of the culture that they have attached themselves to in their lived experience.

13:31Do we think this is the death of cohorts, Matt? When we were now going back from we're going from Z back to A now. We've got who knows what, how B and C and D is going to be defined as next. Is this the death of, or should it be the death of those sort of, the way that we're labeling now those cohorts? I mean, don't get me started on the whole generational naming thing. Like, Gen Xers were Gen Xers. It's okay, we can keep going if you want. I like it. Go for it. Gen Xers were Gen Xers because it was an era of mystery and it was uncertain. And like, I, my own publication ad age was responsible for going to then incrementally Gen Y, and I blame us for that.

14:13And then we've just incremented letters as if that was how generations are named. And it's not, and I want to get off that soapbox, but like, please stop doing this, marketers. Anyway, that was not your question. You think marketers are responsible for that? Because I'm always thinking, who the hell is responsible for the definition of these labels? Marketers push for it really hard. They want to have the labels to label the cohorts. And so we're doing it more aimlessly and faster and earlier in their lives than we used to. It used to be much more intentional. It used to be much more demographically based.

14:44It used to be much more, it would happen later in their life when there was actually something worth naming them about, like millennials. Anyway, that is a huge soapbox. We can do a whole other episode on that sometime. But I'm curious about it, dude. But I'm thinking, here's my thing. It emerges, somebody is making a decision. You're suggesting that it's marketers doing that. I'm always thinking there's like a, there's a dark room at the end of the hallway and somebody's slipping out. It's like voting for the Pope. Now we have to switch to talk about gen alpha. The entire like naming of generations is really marketer driven.

15:21It started at the advent of when advertising became very like professional. And we, we started putting that forward like that. it's always kind of been the case but it's so interesting matt like what you're saying of like we've gotten so like efficient at it uh yeah that's that's so true i thought i could just blame yankilovich back to our original book at the beginning of this conversation it would be better with a backroom and if anyone wants to like find me on linkedin like i want to start a generational naming cabal and fix this for everybody. I've said, like, I think it only would take about 20 people.

16:00I know who most of them are. Like, we should have a back room where we all go and we figure out what the name is and just tell the world. I think the marketing community is fine with that. We just need something to use as a name and an email so we can say we want to go talk to this group. I always thought it was somebody who was selling services. I thought it was somebody who was selling services who was then thinking, okay, I need to re, okay, I've got to look at my projections for the next five years. So I got to, I got to rename the next group of young people coming up and I've got to create this, this formula around what makes them different.

16:39Yes. It's, it's, it seems to, I always thought it came, it came from a self-centered point of view. I mean, the reality is what's the advantage or why do we even have these labels, Matt? I mean, to go back to your earlier point, like, I think the cohorts are still a useful lens, right? It's still important to understand what is happening to a group of people. But it shouldn't be and I hope is no longer the only lens. A life stage lens is a much more useful and functional lens, but it is also good to understand, like, the things that tie us together as well as the things that segment us. And, like, a life stage model is not meant to replace a consumer segmentation.

17:25You should still do that for your product or your service. But it's good to understand how your segments are going through a life stage model as well. When we look at all of this as sort of shifts and changes, what is your most overlooked shift that you think has been happening and what are the implications associated with that so one of my favorites is the shift in when we get our driver's license and how many kids get their driver's license um and i say this as a dad of teenagers and i just took two of them out driving for the first time like last night so this is all very much in my ahead. But we see that fewer kids are getting the driver's license at 16.

18:06That's now shifted more toward 19. And some kids aren't getting it at all for a while. And that seems like kind of not a big deal, right? But it is. And it's when we think about why that happens. And I've asked major automotive manufacturers, like, why do you think that is? And they're like, oh, it's social media. Oh, it's digital connectivity. Oh, it's maybe the economy. It's expensive to afford insurance. But beneath that is a thing that's actually kind of rooted in some of our generational stereotypes, and that is public policy about graduated driver's licenses. So when a kid gets a license now, it's not a free to do whatever you are.

18:48You're 16. Here's your license. Go. So it's, okay, but you can only drive with one friend until you're 17. Or you can have a curfew at 10 o 'clock. And in the driver's ed seminar I had to go to as a parent, they bring that home hard. They're like, so if there's a 10 o 'clock curfew and it's 10 o 'clock in a heartbeat, your child becomes an uninsured motorist. And you could see the entire room of parents sit up and focus. And they're like, oh, that's a thing. And if you get a ticket, you lose your license completely. Yeah, it's all kind of bad. Or if you get rear-ended, it's not your fault. You're still not covered.

19:28It's great. So pay attention to the curfew. But anyway, there's this public policy, which was rooted in these kind of baby boomer sentiments of helicopter parenting. This all started in the 90s. And that's when you start to see the decline in kids getting their driver's license because it decouples the driver's license and freedom. And that has some impacts that you can expect. And I've been writing about that part for years, but I only recently discovered some research from the Federal Reserve that that causally led to a decline in teenage labor force participation and an increase in teens staying in school and not dropping out.

20:10and as we think about the problems of the 20-something male which we've touched on a little bit here some of it is rooted in that they didn't go and get a start economically they maybe stayed in school when maybe that wasn't the path they should have been on it's perfectly okay for people to drop out of high school or graduate high school and go into a trade and get a skilled job, but instead they're staying in school longer. And so this public policy thing that started in the 90s, based on a generational feeling about parenting, based on really their generation's parents and how they handled things, and it has all of these knock-on effects that start to become economic effects, that start to become social effects, that become more economic effects.

20:59And it's all because of this one little thing that everybody totally overlooks, including the car makers. So let me make sure I understand there. So what is the connection between kids staying in school longer and the helicopter parenting on driver's licenses? So the helicopter parenting led to the public policy about graduated driver's licenses. I'm not arguing against that in any way. It has been a hugely effective public policy. It has reduced teenage driving deaths and therefore overall driving deaths. That's awesome. But we fix any other systems. So because they are not getting their driver's license, they can't drive themselves to a job.

21:38Therefore, they also can't drive themselves to go hang out with their friends. And so because of both of those outlets not being there, they're staying in school longer. And that's fascinating to watch those dots connect. The reports that I referenced at the opening of the show, there's three of them. There's Modern Milestones, there's Success and the American Dream, three different reports. Tell us about what you were, tell us about those reports and the implications of those reports on what we've been talking about. Sure. So I think I'll start with the modern milestones. Over my career, I've been trying to kind of understand people and demographics and the things that are changing.

22:18That was true when I worked at AdAge. That was true when I worked at Livability. It's true as I work at AdSose. and one thing i had been noticing is that we have a whole bunch of just straight up demographic shifts that have happened really over the course of my lifetime and a little longer and because of that there are actually new life stages that i don't think we are thinking about in quite the right way so if you go back to just 1970 which some of us in this room were alive then certainly your bosses probably were your boss's bosses were the people who are making decisions in your company it was a very different world demographically in the u.s than it is today and by that i mean like we were getting married at 21 we were having a kid at 21 we were buying a home by 28 we'd get our driver's license 16 and we would do all of the kind of things that people do about those big milestones and a lot of those happened really early into your 20s so So a lot of people did not go to college.

23:19They would graduate from high school. They would get a job. Maybe they didn't enter the military, whatever. And then they would get on there with their life. And if you fast forward to now, which is not that far away, right? We're talking about like a generation or two. All of those milestones have moved. And the ones that have moved kind of the most are the ones on the younger side. So first marriage is now at about 29. First child is right around the same point. We're now buying a home more in our mid to late 30s, getting closer to 40. We're even getting our driver's licenses later. And because of that, there is this period of being a 20-something that didn't used to exist.

24:01And as we were talking about, that is the point at which marketers start to pay attention to generations. And so because there's this life stage that wasn't there, we're still thinking of this as generational differences and we look at a piece of data of like oh here's what the 18 to 25 year olds think and here's what the 35 to 44 year olds think and they're totally different so it must be a generational difference when really it's just now that older people have gone through these milestones and the younger ones haven't yet and so i was kind of working on this and at the same time i was noticing that we have a shift on the other end of the spectrum as well, that the modal age of death, which is a much nerdier term than life expectancy, but is actually the age at which we die, that's gone up seven years over that course of that time.

24:52And that means that there's also this life stage happening later in life. In the U.S., we are not necessarily healthier for that period. So there's another super nerdy term called the health span, which is the healthy part of your life. And the U.S. has the biggest difference between the health span, your healthy long life, which goes to about 66, and your modal age of death, which is 85 here now, of any industrialized nation. So we have this period where we are living longer but not necessarily healthier. But then as I thought about it over the summer, I started realizing that there's a whole model to put together of how these things change.

25:37Because as this has now played out over a couple generations, if you're having your kids at 30 and they're having their kids at 30, you're becoming a grandparent now more in your 60s, but your parents are living longer. And so the caregiving burden starts to shift, especially as you're more likely to be caring now for your older kids than you used to be. There are now more kids living at home with their parents than are living with their spouses at that age, which is a total reversal. And you've got four times as many people going to college now as did in 1970. So that is changing where we are in our economic careers as we start later but ramp up faster in our earning potential.

26:19And all of this means that we really have this whole new model of what our lives look like and the periods at which marketers should be paying attention to those shifts. I was just going to build on that and say, I think, Fergus, back to your original point of like, we spend a lot of time talking about these generations, but what's really interesting about these life stages and how it's shifting and that space between is really like elongating, as Matt was saying, is that there's a lot of tension and fertile ground there in those transitions between stages. Because I think a lot of people think like, oh, Gen Z, they're getting married late they're doing all this stuff late and that's you know that's on purpose that's their choice but really what we see is that people in that generation they still want those things right they still want those milestones to happen they're just taking longer for them to happen and so there is a lot of tension there where we're seeing a lot of people in that generation who are sort of in this YOLO space of, you know, I think, what did you call it, Matt?

27:30Nouveau nihilism? That is one of our Ipsos global trends, yes. Yeah, where they are, you know, things seem so far off for them and so out of reach that they still want as far as those milestones that they're just like, well, I'm just going to live for today because I might never get there. And I think that it's those spaces between those life stages and their elongating that is that really rich territory where we can be tapping into, and you see brands doing that. If I'm a strategist at an agency, and I'm trying to think about the implications of this, Matt, like what do I do? Do I need to abandon demographics?

28:10Do I need to abandon the structures of the typical cohorts? And do I just need to be spending more time understanding the experiences of people as they move from life stage to life stage? Is that the new sort of currency that we need to be thinking about? Is it life stage now rather than cohort group, etc.? I mean, I would never abandon demographics, right? Like, demographics, I forget who, one of the early sociologists talked about how demographics are destiny. And that's absolutely true. Like, the economic crisis of 2008 led to 500 ,000 fewer babies being born in the U.S. 18 years later, we are seeing that in terms of there are now 500 ,000 fewer kids going into college.

29:03That's going to ramp up because the birth rate never recovered from that. Even like it was declining already. It declined a lot harder in 2008. It never came back even to where it would have been if it had just continued its previous decline. Like that's pure demographics. That's just math. But that totally impacts size of markets and shapes of markets. But I think if you start to think about targeting these life stages and targeting these moments, it doesn't matter to some degree if it's a 35-year-old going through it or a 30-year-old going through it. They're more likely to have same buying patterns if they have a 2-year-old than a 35-year-old with no kids and a 30-year-old with an 8-year-old.

29:48it's important to be thinking about where they are along this life's journey and how these things that are based in demographic shifts are affecting where they are in their life stage and when. I'm curious, now that you've sort of made this observation about the different stages on the front and the back end of the generations, what implication does that have for the others in the middle? what what do you now think of as the best way to think about life stages how do you label those stages well the parenting shift so the period where you are only caring for your own young kids has moved later and it's deeply compressed because as the older generations are living longer, and you are perhaps caring for at least one parent, if not two, there's really not that much time left when you are only caring for your only kids.

30:47So this period where you're caring for your kids gets longer as they need care longer, all the way to 30 in some cases, and you're caring for your parents who have outlived their health span, that starts to get a lot longer. And the period of being like an empty nester, if you ever get that, also compresses too. So I think there are a lot of implications for marketers in terms of not just messaging, but also understanding the economic realities that people are facing in this zero-sum economy, which is a whole other soapbox I could get on. 40 or so percent depending on when we ask if people say that once they pay their monthly bills they don't have any money left over and that's not just a low-income thing that's about like three and ten higher income households too and so as you think about how if gas prices this week are the thing going up something else has to give there's a really long period where our budget It is stretched by that caregiving experience for ourselves, our kids, and our elders.

31:57And that makes a lot of tough choices for people economically. And it's not just that you are competing in that case with your own product category. You are now competing with everything. The other night when we were at our live show in Johannes Leonardo, as I mentioned, planners pitch campaigns they love but they never worked on. One of those was aura and the entire category of wearables to the point you touched on Matt a little bit earlier, but I thought what was interesting about, um, it was interesting about the aura strategy is they flipped it from originally being about, you know, biohackers and people who are just obsessed with fitness.

32:39and they shifted it from this sort of idea of not looking at aging as being a threat, but looking at it as being an aspiration. It's something that you need to live well rather than avoid, is what Aura is doing with their ring. That to me strikes like that's super conscious of what you're talking about, not only an aging population that is living healthier lifestyles, but this not as being so obsessive about avoiding uh age and aging i thought was a really brilliant space that was really different for them to be in yeah i think there's a lot of really good examples of that where like these shifts are opening up opportunities to message around different topics to tap into different tension points than we've had before and that's like That's exciting creatively, right?

33:33Because you don't have to keep going to the same well and the same tropes and all these stereotypes. It does open up a lot of opportunity for creativity. So it is a really difficult balance to find, I think, in terms of how we depict that in advertising and making sure that we are showing aspiration, but in a way that is still relevant with their current reality. Yeah, and I think what we saw this past year in the Effie Awards in North America was the fact that many of the brands who were winning in this space were not even reflecting any level of that faux aspiration. they were rooted in the reality of my life today rather than what it might be going forward and they were hugely successful by not selling a dream or some variation of that but celebrating my life today and that's one of i think we also just dropped our new uh ipsos global trends report our 10th edition of that and that's one of the most powerful trends we see in that report throughout the world is this idea of escaping to individualism.

34:38That as the world geopolitically and socioeconomically feels really out of control to us and really uncertain and it's hard to plan, we focus instead on controlling what we can, which is ourselves and how we show up in the world. And that's partially through the products we buy and the services we buy, but it's also just through what our aspirations are. And for marketers to earn the trust in order to have those conversations is super, super important. Yeah, I love that. Escape to individualism. That's super smart. So Matt, what do you think marketers need to be doing as they listen to this show?

35:11What should they be doing next if they understand clearly what we're talking about here? What's the implication for them right away? All right, so the two short-term things are pay more attention to life stages and pay attention to the fact that those life stages have changed. If you start to understand where your customers are in their lives, you'll be able to talk to them a lot better. And the other part of that is to understand that that model, because those life stages have changed and those milestones have moved, that how they are defining success is also changing as we live in these uncertain times and we live in these, frankly, challenging economic times.

35:51So if you understand where your competitive set lives, if you understand where your customers are in their lives. And if you understand how to reach them and how those things are changing and how to help them succeed however they're defining it, that's a great place to be. And we see that customers are looking for that from the products they buy and from the brands and from the messaging. The biggest change in our Ipsos global trends over the last 13 years is people saying that they want to buy products that align with their values. So there's all of this opportunity for brands to play a role in our lives.

36:28We are looking for them for that. And if you understand this journey better, you'll be able to better communicate and better show up authentically and earn that trust that you need. It's easy to say that this is what consumers want and this is what they want from brands and they're giving us this permission. I think the reason why we're not taking it as much as we could is that marketers and creatives as well are living inside sort of our own echo chamber. And what we talked about earlier, where we tend to be higher income, we tend to be more urban. And so there's this big gap between our lived experiences versus the audience.

37:07And so we project our own life phases that we went through and our own timelines and our own values onto the consumer, onto the audience. And that can be really dangerous if we don't ever invite the audience in to check our understanding and to test out those sort of assumptions or stereotypes that we just naturally have to make when we're making that leap of trying to resonate with someone that is not us. It's Matt Carmichael, SVP, Consumer Trends in North America at Ipsos, and Lisa Zielinski, SVP, Creative Excellence Strategy for Ipsos. I'm assuming that some of these the three reports we referred to today Matt, are they available for our listeners to tag into or can I put links in the show notes?

37:54Yes, so Ipsos gives away a lot of this stuff for free the two issues about the future the Modern Milestones POV you can google Ipsos Modern Milestones you can ask your favorite AI chatbot about the Ipsos Modern Milestones report or model it'll take you right there. You can go to Ipsos.com and sign up for your newsletters or just follow me on LinkedIn. I write about this stuff all the time. Yeah, we'll drop them on this episode's page on our website also. Thanks, guys. Have a great weekend. Thanks for coming on, Matt. I think we should do this again sometime. Absolutely. My pleasure. Thanks for having me.

38:29It doesn't hurt the fact that we live in the same town. Cheers. Thanks, everybody. And we'll see everyone on the next episode.