Marketing companies have been competing for the minds of millennials fiercely over the last few years – and for good reason.

Millennials represent about a quarter of the entire US population, and have over $200 billion in annual buying power. Though they have less discretionary income than Baby Boomers and older generations, they have a lot of influence – and are hard to reach with traditional marketing methods.

But are millennials still the hottest consumers out there? Or should we be focusing our efforts on a new generation of consumers? Here’s the scoop.

Millennials Are Still The Most Important Consumer Generation – For Now

Millennials are defined as individuals who were between 18-34 in 2015 by the Pew Research Center. They are just now entering the prime of their lives as consumers.

As millennials age, their income continues to grow as a generation. Most millennials are now out of college and working in professional careers, and millennials are the most educated generation to date.

This means that the buying power of millennials is only going to grow in future years, as they begin to start families and earn more discretionary income.

However, millennials will not stay at the top of the heap forever. As time goes on, Generation Z continues to grow – and a new generation of consumer is born.

Gen Z – The Largest Consumer Generation In History

Generation Z is defined as the “post-millennial” generation. While most definitions vary, it’s agreed that most Gen Z individuals were born around the year 2000 or later. This generation already makes up 25% of the population, and is forecasted to continue to grow.

As Gen Z becomes older, and younger people begin to enter the consumer market, they are likely to become the most highly sought-after consumer generation, just as millennials were before them.

Focus On Millennials In Marketing Efforts – But Don’t Forget About Gen Z!

How should brands market their products? Luckily, millennials and Gen Z both share a few common attributes. Consumers from both generations are tech-savvy and have quite a bit of influence on the market – and both Gen Z and millennial consumers do not respond well to traditional advertising methods.

While millennials should be the focus on most marketing efforts, Gen Z should not be overlooked. Brands should be using social media platforms like Snapchat, Instagram and Twitter to reach a younger audience, and should always be on the lookout for hot trends that could appeal to Gen Z consumers.

Conclusion

As time goes on, millennials will become less important as a consumer audience, and the importance of Gen Z will grow. So focus on millennials for now, but don’t forget about the younger generation.

Google+ has been suffering from what many tech blogs and business publications are calling a “slow death”—its initial launch established the site as an attempt to be a fully-integrated social platform, with its multifaceted approach rivaling companies like Facebook, Dropbox, WordPress, and Skype.

However, after failing to gain both traction and users in the social media community, it recently announced that it will be splitting the platform into three different components: Hangouts, Photos, and Streams. Hangouts is a video chatting service that will remain independent of Google+, photos is a storage space for images that will be added to Google Drive, and streams covers the rest of the Google+ experience along with News and Blogger.

While the idea of a streamlined, all-in-one social media platform sounded like a good idea, perhaps it was the ambition of the venture that led to its demise; users considered the Google+ login to YouTube a nuisance, found the interface unaesthetic, and the whole system a cheap Facebook facsimile.

Google has finally compromised, maintaining the best aspects of Google+ like Hangouts and Photos, and has removed the Google+ sign-in on YouTube, much to users’ delight.

The moral of the story: Don’t put all of your digital marketing eggs in one basket, especially if your product is at risk of being disruptive—and not in the good way.

What Sparks Our Fire: Google+ taking the next step forward and making smart decisions in the face of a highly-publicized technological failure.

What Sparks Our Fire:  The perfect Facebook feature to celebrate friendships on social media.

Will you be using Say Thanks? Create your personalized video card here.

Cameras are powerful tools to control the memories we make. In a 2010 TED Talk, psychologist and Nobel Prize winner professor Daniel Kahneman, presented the idea that millennials see the present as an “anticipated memory.” In other words, when a person takes an Instagram picture, that person is both experiencing the present reality and actively shaping how that reality will be remembered in the future. As a result, many will argue they are betraying the present by not living in the moment. But, are the memories the real motive why the ‘Instagram generation’ is so addicted to capturing the moment?

Internet surveys indicate over 80% of social media posts to sites like Instagram, Twitter and others amount to “announcements about one’s own immediate experiences”. We post pictures of what we eat, drink, where we’ve been and calmly await for the next tsunami of likes. But what is it that makes us post those pictures on Instagram? Can’t we keep those for our private use? It is undeniable we like the attention but, why do we like the attention so much?

In 2012, Harvard University National Academy of Sciences conducted a study to assess how much people liked talking about themselves and why. The results is that Humans get a biochemical buzz from self-disclosure. We devote almost 40% of conversation sharing our own experience. Sharing personal information activates the reward areas of the brain. The same as we experience after sex, food or getting money. Talking about other people in contrast does not activate the rewarding part of the brain. What is most interesting is the findings also revealed people actually love self-disclosure if they knew people were listening. All of this goes along way toward explaining the appeal of self-promoting social-media platforms like Facebook, Twitter or Instagram.

What Sparks Our Fire: The power of self-disclosure on social media through pictures.

Do you agree with Daniel Kahneman’s statement or do you think this entire generation is sharing Instagram pictures with the ultimate goal of a social validation? We would like to hear your thoughts.

Someone else has a toy, and Facebook really wants to play with it.

Several weeks ago, Facebook quietly shut down Poke, an app that was pretty much a clone of the monsterously successful Snapchat. Poke was released in 2012 and was touted as the next big thing in Facebook’s family of apps. However it was never on the same level as Snapchat, and in 2013, Facebook attempted and failed to purchase Snapchat with an offer to the tune of $3 billion.

It would seem that the Snapchat model is something Facebook desperately wants to get a toehold in, as evidenced by reports of a new app called Slingshot, which sends short video messages by tapping on the screen. The same reports caution that the app, while it has been in production for some months, may never be released.

Maybe it’s for the best. No one has yet managed to out-Snapchat Snapchat.

What Sparks Our Fire: It’s easy to tell what’s important in social media by the way that Facebook reacts to it.

Would you try out a Snapchat clone?

Something that bothers me personally is when I get the prompt asking if I want to tag a friend in one of their friends photos. I will never ever click this. This is an incredibly awkward situation waiting to happen. I don’t know their friend and I’m always worried that I’ll accidentally click it and have to have an odd interaction with them.

Now, Facebook is letting you ask your friends about their relationship status. To be clear, you’re asking people who have elected not to share. You click “ask” and you have to send the other user a message about why you want to know. Basically, this is the line between “flirty” and “really really awkward”.

If you receive one of these messages, you can list select a status that only the other person can see, leaving it private from the rest of the world. This adds an extra layer to Facebook, which seems like it can become a sort of dating site.

I just hope I don’t accidentally click it on the profile of the cute girl who makes the espresso at Starbucks.

What Sparks Our Fire: Being aware of what the new clickable buttons do.

Would you ever ask a friend if they were single?

Facebook is killing it this week.

App Links are Facebook’s new tools, attempting to make it easier for developers to link other applications from their own apps. For instance, if someone tapped on a post from Tumblr in their Facebook feed, they would be taken directly to the Tumblr app rather than a mobile browsing window. This kind of programming exists, and has been called mobile deep linking, but it’s not easy to use since many apps interact in different ways on different platforms in relation to each other.

Using the open-sourced App Links, developers can code the links directly into the guts of their web page, taking a user directly from one app to another without having to login to the other app or getting booted to a mobile page. It’s all about streamlining the process, and helping mobile applications interact seamlessly with each other.

What Sparks Our Fire: Solving a major problem and open-sourcing the solution.

What apps would you like to see linked to each other in this way?

The problem is that when you login to these websites with your Facebook, you’re giving them an amount of access to your personal info that you may not be comfortable with. Certain sites and apps may post on your behalf, or have access to your pertinent info or friends lists. It’s really weird when you think about it, and Mark Zuckerberg knows it and wants to give you more control over what you share.

At F8, Zuckerberg announced that users will have more direct control of their content, choosing what exactly they share and even enabling an anonymous login feature. Sure, some apps may not work well without some personal information, but it’s better than feeling like these third parties have access to all your stuff.

What Sparks Our Fire: Keeping our private info private.

How much do you think you’re sharing with other websites?

Social media is an important facet of our daily lives, but the trick to putting it to good use is to find the right balance between what you share and what you don’t share. Companies and brands should share everything they want their customers to know. Normal, everyday users should be a little more judicious.

That’s why Facebook’s new tool may be sharing too much. On Thursday, the social media giant will launch “Nearby Friends”, a feature of their app that will allow you to broadcast your exact location to all your friends. Your precise coordinates will be available to anyone who has also opted into this entirely voluntary service.

The purported purpose of this service is to help users engage in real life, offline. As with the rest of Facebook, the privacy settings can be customized to your liking, sharing what you like with whom you like. However, this leads into the realm of oversharing. For the most part, I don’t want to know where my high school classmates are, and if I did I’d ask them where they are. In my profile, this feature will probably collect dust, rarely if ever used.

But then what if it becomes a trend to have this feature activated? Because then Facebook knows where you are at all times. And are we sure we can trust these large entities with the minutiae of our daily comings and goings? It’s a small measure of privacy to be sure, but a valuable one as well. Time will tell how this feature will end up shaping the user experience.

What Sparks Our Fire: Awareness of the coming trends, and taking care not to share too much.

Do you feel comfortable with this new feature?

So, this past week Facebook acquired virtual reality wunderkind Oculus Rift for $2 billion in cash and stock. For Oculus, this is a huge win in a succession of huge wins. For Facebook, this is a long-term bet that may or may not pay off.

Oculus Rift gained prominence as the most successful Kickstarter campaign ever, raising $2 million in 2012 and $91 million in venture funding later. The headset is purported to be one of the most incredible virtual reality experiences available, according to Mashable. For a cool price of $2 billion, that’s an incredible turnaround.

For Facebook, this is not the first time they’ve dropped a huge amount of money on a tech startup. Earlier this year Facebook bought messaging service WhatsApp for $16 billion, so $2 billion for Oculus must seem like spare change. Mark Zuckerberg calls this move “a longterm bet on the future of computing.” In essence, it seems like this was just a move for ownership, and neither Oculus or Facebook will change much because of it.

This all may be true, but as far as the future of Facebook as a company, this may not have been the best investment. With the loss of Facebook’s “Cool Factor” amongst young people, it’s hard to see what Zuckerberg is justifying this purchase with. However, we will see how the purchase plays out and pays off in the future of Facebook.

What Sparks Our Fire: Watching how companies prepare for the future is important for us as advertisers. Seeing the ebb and flow of technology is what prepares us for the next big thing.

Have you tried an Oculus Rift?