Long but interesting read for future.

My attention span was a little tired after reading this but I stuck through it so anybody could.

Marketing shift seen for Millennial generation

Benny Evangelista, Chronicle Staff Writer

Monday, August 22, 2011

In a recent survey of incoming college freshmen, 87 percent favored watching TV and movies online instead of subscribing to a cable service, while 76 percent spent more than an hour a day on Facebook.

Also, 75 percent sent more than 20 text messages per day and 58 percent used Twitter "all the time," yet only 5 percent planned to buy a PC.

Those students, who are starting their college life as soon as today, are the youngest of a tech-infused millennial generation who - in sharp contrast to Baby Boomers and other previous generations - no longer view a driver's license as a rite of passage into adulthood.

"For millennials, if you were to think about the thing that enables freedom and independence, it's your first cell phone, and it not happening when you're in your late teens or early 20s," said Ford Motor Co. futurist Sheryl Connelly. "It's probably happening in your preteen years,"

Connelly, the automaker's manager of global trends and futuring, headed a panel discussion last week at Twitter Inc. headquarters in San Francisco on how Ford was designing cars and marketing to appeal to the 16-to-32 age group known as the millennial generation.

At the same time, Mr Youth, a New York marketing services agency that specializes in studying the youth market, released results of a separate survey of 5,000 incoming college students who represent the graduating class of 2015.

Both Ford and Mr Youth presented similar insights into how technology - especially those produced by Bay Area companies like Facebook, Twitter, Netflix, Pandora Media and Apple - are causing a cultural shift in the attitudes of the millennial generation.

To be sure, that generation has also been reshaped by nontech events. The class of 2015, for example, is an "innocence lost" generation forever changed by the sobering terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and the economic recession at the end of the decade, said Matt Britton, Mr Youth founder and chief executive officer.

"This has conditioned them to not take anything for granted and appreciate the good things in life," the report said. They also view their parents as role models and are not as rebellious or antiestablishment as Boomers were.

They also believe that the technology at their fingertips gives them the ability to make a difference in the world and "empowered them with a sense that anything is possible if you are willing to work hard," the study said.

"This generation has grown up watching (Facebook co-founder) Mark Zuckerberg build one of the world's most valuable companies through social media. They have seen the influence that organized groups and individuals alike are able to steer via social communities and they are more than capable of wielding this power themselves."

Half the students have more than 300 friends on Facebook and 59 percent visited the social network during class. "Facebook is like a dial tone for this audience," Britton said.

One surprise result showed the effects of online video such as YouTube and Netflix. Only 13 percent of the students planned to subscribe to a cable TV service, a sign of a coming "seismic shift of consumer media consumption habits," Britton said. Right now, "the lion's share" of ad dollars still goes to traditional TV channels, but that may have to change, he said.

Owning less important

Companies like online movie and TV rental service Netflix and video game retailer GameStop, which offers a used-game trading service, have changed the concept of ownership, said Ford's Connelly. That's another shift from the "conspicuous consumption" mantra of Baby Boomers, who "signaled to the world that they were successful through fancy cars, expensive jewelry and very large homes."

"Netflix has really taught us that it doesn't matter if you own a movie as long as you have access to it," she said. "With companies like GameStop, you don't hold onto a game for life, you master the game, you trade it in and you get something else. So the idea of owning is not important to them. There's no stigma about saying, 'I rented this, I borrowed this.' "

And social networking and smart phones are replacing the need to go drive somewhere to connect with friends.

"The average millennial would rather lose their wallet than their cell phone because their cell phone contains much more valuable information and resources," Connelly said. "Through these virtual connections, they actually are transcending time and space, so that they don't need a car as much as they did."

Those changes pose problems for a company used to marketing cars like the luxury Lincoln brand as symbols of life status, a message that wasn't resonating with the millennial generation. Moreover, statistics show that for a variety of reasons, younger people are delaying getting their licenses and are driving less than older generations.

So Ford has begun designing and marketing cars for their ability to keep the owner connected to their world, not for productivity or business reasons cited by Baby Boomers, but for social reasons. That means the ability to connect cars with smart phones is standard equipment.

Video gauge

Also, for a generation bred on video games, Ford has designed a video gauge for electric and hybrid vehicles that turns achieving the best fuel efficiency into a game.

Since one study shows 60 percent of the millennial generation have at least one tattoo, and 40 percent of that group have multiple tattoos, Ford offers a graphics program that lets customers customize their cars. The company also looks at different colors and fabrics that are more expressive, including an Apple-inspired high-gloss finish.

"We belive that this customization is the millennials' way of adding meaning to something that would otherwise be meaningless to them," Connelly said.

Every parent and kid should watch this video!!

This is my prayer for my children. I hope its the same for yours. Thank you God for John Piper.

John Piper: A Challenge to Young People

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=LVhd9ZHkrx4

In a sermon delivered last Sunday, entitled Holy Ambition: To Preach Where Christ Has Not Been Named, John Piper briefly turns his attention to the children in the audience. In a culture of extended adolescence and spiritual immaturity, his words bear particular relevance to us all.

At 7 minutes, 45 seconds, this video is already longer than the attention span of your average, TV-addicted American teenager. But we want you all to watch it. In fact, we would like you to share it with your family (for example, our six-year-old brother James watched the whole thing). Whether you’re young or old, you will be blessed and challenged by its message.

Note: For those who cannot view the video or would like to see the message in its entirety—and we encourage you to do so—the full video, text and audio are available by clicking here.

Lets change the culture of our area!!!

“Rebelize” Your Youth Group

I would like to focus, in this post, on the need for a specific type of reformation. The big focus of A Shining Salty City On Stand was the necessity of both individuals and community. While I did not directly mention this in that post, what we were talking about was a perfect description of the Body of Christ, the Church. A body has many different parts, all of which have different strengths and weakness, different functions and responsibilities, but who work together to accomplish the purpose of the Head, Jesus Christ. This is also true of a rebelution, which is why our first step must be to awaken the church.

It’s flattering when the world admires your maturity and vision. It’s incredibly gratifying when people jokingly say, “Wow! Whoever is taking the Democratic presidential nomination in 2040, watch out!” The problem with this is that it places you into the category of a “statistical anomaly.” We must not be satisfied with simply being better than the average teenager. Such a classification reinforces, rather than combats, the myth of adolescence. As the old saying goes, “The exception only proves the rule.”

When we’re an individual exception, we stand out as an individual. The tendency is to get comfortable with being “one-of-a-kind.” We then fail to encourage others to reach their full potential, because we don’t want them to steal our limelight. Such an attitude goes directly against the heart of a rebelution and is detrimental to its cause.

We cannot be elitist. We must fight for humility. Even while we decry the state of our fellow youth, we must not condemn or separate ourselves from them. The heart of a rebelution is the truth that all young people have the ability to accomplish much greater things than our culture would have them to think. Because of that, we must be constant encouragers. As Jesus said, “Let the greatest among you become as the youngest, and the leader as one who serves.”

To be a rebelutionary, we must constantly strive to reduce the focus on ourselves as individuals, and to place the focus on the community of the Church. The only way to truly combat cultural expectations is to create a culture that results in an entire community of mature and responsible young people. To effect widespread change, we must produce such a communities in churches across the nation. Sadly, the average youth group in the U.S. today is falling incredibly short of this calling.

I challenge each of you to become a reformer among your church’s youth. Change the cultural expectations of young people in your local church. Create a local community that defies our culture’s expectations. The homeschool movement started with a vision to change the culture by reforming the home. The next step is to reform the church.

I want the comment section to be brainstorm central. Start by thinking about, and then pooling your answers, to the following preliminary questions:

1.) What is the current state of the youth culture in your church? Does it embrace or resist our society’s expectations?

2.) Who do you need collaborate with within your church in order to bring about change?

Please do not limit yourself to the above questions. Further questions and thoughts on the posts are encouraged. Soli Deo Gloria!

For Young Men and Fathers

Becoming Men: Feats of our Forefathers

Our second article published with Boundless Webzine.

We’re all familiar with names like George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Samuel Adams and John Hancock. These men, along with others, were our forefathers and the founders of our nation. They signed the Declaration of Independence and wrote the Constitution. They won the Revolutionary War.

Not only that, but their incredible accomplishments weren’t limited to their adult lives. John Hancock entered Harvard University when he was 13 years old. Samuel Adams completed his master’s degree before he turned 21. Thomas Jefferson frequently studied 15 hours a day during his time at the College of William and Mary.

Of course, at this point it’s easy for all of us normal people to place these guys in the “superhuman” or “so-smart-it’s-disgusting” category and move on. However, there’s a danger in thinking that God simply blessed America with a generation chock-full of patriotic super-nerds just in time to write the Constitution.

You see, once we label people as a “geniuses” we usually cease to feel the need to learn from them or to be challenged by their example. The truth is that our forefathers weren’t nerds and their early college entrances were not unusual for their time.

Rather, what stood these young men apart from their peers was (1) a seemingly corporate sense that age could not keep them from accomplishing great things, and (2) an extraordinary drive that we like to call the “do hard things” mentality.

As we explore the different ways these traits played out in the early years of some of our most famous forefathers, our hope is that we will all gain a greater vision of our own God-given potential and calling.

George Washington: “He Didn’t Mark Time”

We all know George Washington as the first President of the United States, the Commander of the Revolutionary Army and the Father of our Country. These are impressive titles and the jobs that went with them couldn’t be more difficult.

But a quick glance at Washington’s teenage and young adult years indicates that these weren’t his first big titles or even his first weighty responsibilities. Rather, what comes through is a man who, from his childhood, chose to do hard things, and then did those things to the best of his ability.

According to the George Washington Bicentennial Committee (WBC), Washington was born into a “middling rank” family, lost his father when he was 11, and was never considered particularly bright or educated by his peers. Nevertheless, he developed a “passion for education [that] caused him to concentrate on hard study” and he mastered geometry, trigonometry, and surveying by the time he was 16 years old.

At the age of 17, Washington received his first big job when Lord Thomas Fairfax, one of the largest landowners in Virginia (we’re talking 5.3 million acres here), named him official surveyor for Culpepper County, Virginia.

At the time surveyors were some of the highest paid workers in the country, second only to trial lawyers. This means that Washington, at age 17, was earning today’s equivalent of over $100,000 a year.

Don’t get this wrong. Washington wasn’t an ornament who sat in an office while adult men did the real work. His journals reflect the rigor of frontier life and the WBC describes the appointment as “the fitting of a man’s tasks to the square young shoulder of a boy without cutting those tasks to a boy’s measure.”

Washington was a man at 17 years old.

Three years later Washington received his next big responsibility when the governor of Virginia, Robert Dinwiddie, appointed him district adjutant of the militia, with the rank of major.

Then, when word came that the French were encroaching on Ohio territory, Governor Dinwiddie chose young Major Washington to lead a mid-winter expedition to assess French military strength and intentions, and to warn the French to leave.

We don’t know about you, but to us traveling hundreds of miles in the middle of winter to tell a large garrison of French soldiers to pack up and leave doesn’t sound very easy or appealing. That’s because it wasn’t.

Nevertheless, 21-year-old Washington not only successfully carried out this mission, but also continued to serve as a primary negotiator and principle actor throughout the French and Indian War.

By age 22 he had been promoted to Lieutenant Colonel and by age 23 he was Commander in Chief of the entire Virginia Militia. He’d been shaving for less than a decade, but no one seemed to notice, and we’re sure he never mentioned it.

Perhaps the WBC put it best when they wrote, “[Washington] did not mark time in any of the important positions of his life…. Just as [he] stepped into a man-sized job as a surveyor, so when he accepted Governor Dinwiddie’s mission to Ohio he stepped not only into a man-sized task but into a path which led, as we now are able to trace it, directly to the American independence, of which he was the chosen instrument.”

As The Twig Is Bent, So Grows The Tree

Even if we’d never read a history book and were forced to go solely off of what we now know about the first 23 years of his life, we’d be fools not to predict that George Washington would grow up to be somebody. In fact, we might even insist that he’d become President someday — even bet on it.

That’s because, inside, we all know that young adulthood is not some mystical time period that has no effect on the rest of our lives. These years are the profound shapers of our lives. Here we set our direction, develop habits, and build momentum. As an old saying goes, “As a twig is bent, so grows the tree.”

This understanding is what our founding fathers had in common. It was the secret to their greatness. They put into practice the principle of Lamentations 3:27, “It is good for a man that he bear the yoke in his youth.”

As young adults they adopted the determination and high ideals that went on to characterize their entire lives. Their history-making adult years were directly connected to their focused years as young adults.

It is no coincidence that the same Samuel Adams who organized the Boston Tea Party at age 51 wrote his master’s thesis in defense of the people’s liberties at age 21.

It is no coincidence that David Farragut, who became the U.S. Navy’s first Admiral at age 65, was given command of his first ship at age 12.

It is no coincidence that Alexander Hamilton, who became our nation’s first Secretary of the Treasury at age 34, was a clerk in a counting house at age 13.

Likewise, it is no coincidence that, as the primary author of the Federalist Papers at age 32, Hamilton had already been publishing political pamphlets since he was 19.

And, of course, it is no surprise that the same George Washington who became the Commander-in-Chief of the Revolutionary Army at age 43, was appointed Commander-in-Chief of the Virginia Militia 20 years earlier.

A Revolution Worth Fighting

Of course, it’s one thing to understand this. It’s a whole different thing to apply it to our own lives. But if our desire is to impact this world for Christ, we have to.

We can learn a lot from our forefathers. They lived in a time very different from our own, but their example couldn’t be more relevant. In a world that is looking to our generation for direction and leadership and finding a bunch of kidults, the commitment to do hard things as young adults is a much-needed revolution.

Don’t get us wrong. Our generation won’t be shooting guns or throwing tea in the ocean. Our enemy today is not King George. Rather we do battle with a culture that looks down on true adulthood and celebrates immaturity and irresponsibility.

In 1 Timothy 4:12, Paul writes, “Let no one despise you for your youth, but set the believers an example in speech, in conduct, in love, in faith, in purity.” As followers of Christ, we are called to a higher standard.

We need to be honest with ourselves. Is how we’re spending our time now preparing us for what we want to become? Are we doing hard things now that will equip us for greater things God may have for us in the future? These are the fundamental questions for this season of our lives.

Historian Peter Henriques, author of Realistic Visionary: A Portrait of George Washington, put it this way: “Washington became the man he strove to be.”

Henriques’ statement is not only true of Washington and the rest our forefathers, but it’s also true about us. We will become the men and women we strive to be.

Like our forefathers, this generation faces a crisis and an opportunity. A crisis, in the sense that we can no longer afford to avoid responsibility, and an opportunity, in the sense that we can choose today to buckle down and “do hard things” for the glory of God. The future of our nation and our world depends on it.