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Every two years the Josephson Institute conducts a national survey of ethics among U.S. adolescents. The 2008 data were gathered through a national sample of 29,760 respondents in public and private high schools.

“The results,” the Institute concludes, “paint a troubling picture of our future politicians and parents, cops and corporate executives, and journalists and generals.”

Findings: Good intentions; behavior not so much

• 98% said “It’s important for me to be a person with good character,” and 96% said, “It’s important to me that people trust me.”

• 93% agreed, “In business and the workplace, trust and honesty are essential.”
• 91% said, “People should play by the rules even if it means they lose.”
• 89% declared, “Being a good person is more important than being rich.”
• 84% affirmed, “It’s not worth it to lie or cheat because it hurts your character.”

Things go south

Despite largely orthodox statements about virtuous living, a supermajority of kids admitted behavior that did not measure up to their aspirations. Perhaps this was foreshadowed by the 59% who claimed: “In the real world, successful people do what they have to do to win, even if others consider it cheating.”

• 82% lied to a parent about something significant one or more times in the past year.
• 82% copied another’s homework one or more times in the past year.
• 65% lied to a teacher about something significant one or more times in the past year.
• 64% cheated during a test at school one or more times in the past year.
• 53% admitted they had done things in violation of my religious beliefs one or more times in the past year.
• 42% said, “I sometimes lie to save money.”
• 30% stole something from a store one or more times in the past year.

The analysis suggests things may be worse than they appear:

As bad as these numbers are, it appears they understate the level of dishonesty exhibited by America’s youth. More than one in four (26 percent) confessed they lied on at least one or two questions on the survey. Experts agree that dishonesty on surveys usually is an attempt to conceal misconduct.

Despite these high levels of dishonesty, the respondents have a high self-image when it comes to ethics. A whopping 93 percent said they were satisfied with their personal ethics and character and 77 percent said that when it comes to doing what is right, I am better than most people I know.

In 2012 we’ll begin hiring the people who took this survey to work in our businesses. How do you suppose that’s going to work out?

There is a Jewish proverb — Train up a child in the way he should go and when he is old he will not turn from it (Proverbs 22:6) — which, translated into 21st century American English might go something like: Get your parenting right the first time so we can all get on with our lives.

Given high levels of dishonorable behavior on one hand and high levels of self-satisfaction on the other, the Josephson ethics study suggests we have work to do around the household.

There certainly is enough to cover. Topics in The Gig run the gamut  from company loyalty to forcing the Green issue. Hira’s advice is insightful and useful but never coddling. (Take a look at the title of this post: Gen Yers lack confidence, behave like idiots).  Dare I say she is fair and balanced? If you’re not Gen Y,  The Gig is a good resource for learning more about your young colleagues or even your children.

Check it out. Not only is the blog interesting, but the story behind it is good too. “Young journalist writes a cover story about something important to her and it snowballs into a blog on Fortune’s website.” I like the sound of it.

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They have huge impact on what their parents buy, and then they have their own money, more than any other generation before them, and of course they are the consumers of tomorrow.

But do marketers pay a disproportionate amount of attention to that relatively small population? Sure, Anderson says:

In America, everyone wants to be younger, so we look to younger people. We think they're happier than us and we want to be like them, resulting in a younger-targeted marketing message.

Ahh, so it's about holding onto the past, is it? Not so fast says Ad Age managing editor Judann Pollack:

...There are an estimated 78 million boomers in the U.S. (born between 1946 and 1965), and we are retiring later and working more after retirement. And even before those golden years, we're shelling it out. Information Resources Inc. estimates boomers spend $46 billion annually on package goods alone, while Unilever's research shows that we buy a disproportionate 60% of all package goods.

Pollack quotes Unilever's Eileen Kozin: "You've got to continue to think about this target. It's a huge target, and they're not going away. They're still going to be influential as they get older, and they've got the money to spend."

Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more: it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.
— Wm. Shakespeare, Macbeth, Act 5, scene 5

What sets Ms Pollack's teeth on edge is that this is news to anyone: "These statistics have pretty much always been true, so it's kind of galling that just now marketers have woken up to boomers' value." Larry W. Jones, president of TV Land, told Ad Age, "Three years ago the preponderance of advertisers out there were targeting 18-to-49. Today more and more have started buying into the 25-to-54 demo because [that demo] has the biggest pile of money, and it is growing faster than the 18-to-49 money."

It's about time as far as Ms Pollack is concerned. She doesn't buy Mr Anderson's reasoning:

I don't think boomers want to be young again — I don't think they feel old in the first place. One thing this generation isn't about is giving in to anything gracefully. Its hallmark has been forcefulness, decisiveness and strength. So if you insist on reaching out to us now — years after you so cavalierly threw us away — your communication better be honest and thoughtful.

So . . . did someone just wake up on the wrong side of the generation gap this morning or is Pollack the voice of reason, calling product designers and service providers of all sorts to wake up and smell the money? Or is all this just sound and fury in the ethos of You're Not Good Enough Marketing?

Are they different from their parents and older siblings? You bet. And mainly for the good.

Most business is no longer structured for career employees — which is fine by new workers because most of them don't want to work 30 years for one company.

Most business is no longer structured for career employees — most new workers don’t want to work 30 years for one company.

These days, the heralded war for talent is more often a series of strategic battles and tactical maneuvers to get the right people in place long enough to design and launch a company, product, service or experience — and then get the right people in place to take it to the next level (not necessarily superior; just next). There's nothing new about this. We've known for a long time that executive turn–around experts are not always suited for a company's long haul.

What we have now is a cohort of workers who were not raised on the assumption of 30–years–and–a–pension. There is a largely negative cast on this, mind you, and there's no question we have to convince new workers that we are sincere about their development and long term well–being by rewarding them fairly. But most don't expect that reward to include the guarantee of a job in perpetuity.

That's a significant shift as we think about recruiting, hiring, training, developing, rewarding, retaining and releasing workers. It is changing the face of corporations and family-owned businesses alike.

There's another difference in young workers that's a bit of a sore point for some people — it's this: Whatever you may have heard, young workers have, on the whole, grown up more responsible than their elder siblings and parents. Whatever may have been true in the past, today, it's adults aged 35-49 we have to be concerned about. You can read all about it in Mike Males' New York Times Op–Ed, This Is Your (Father's) Brain on Drugs.

Here are some bullets worth noting:

• In 2004, 18,249 35–49 year–old Americans died from overdoses of illicit drugs — a 550% per capita increase since 1975. The rate of death from illegal drugs is five times higher for 40–49 year–olds than for teenagers.
• 35–49 year–old were 30 percent more at risk from fatal accidents and suicides than 15–19 year–olds.
• In 2005 more than four million 35–49 year–olds were arrested, including a million for violent crimes, 650,000 for drinking–related offenses and half a million for drug offenses — more than a 200% per capita rise in major index felonies since 1975.
• 21 million 35–49 year–olds admitted binge drinking (five or more drinks in a row on one or more occasions in the previous month). This was double the number of binge drinkers among teenagers and college students combined.
• The number of 35–49 year–olds treated in hospital emergency rooms for overdoses of heroin, cocaine, pharmaceuticals and drugs mixed with alcohol was far higher than among teenagers.
• More than half of all new HIV/AIDS diagnoses were given to middle–agers. A decade ago, that rate was less than one–third.
• Today, the age group most at risk for violent death is 40–49 year–olds.

Of course, your mileage may vary — depending on the individuals with whom you work. And that's the point. You don't hire a generation of workers; you hire individual workers who have certainly been formed along with the others they grew up with but whose perceptions and capabilities and potential follow individual trajectories.

Whether you're considering people near your age or young men and women who could be the offspring of your peers, it's a mistake to make age-based assumptions about individual workers — always and ever.

Our sympathies and prayers go out to those affected by the Virginia Tech shootings

Teen People Magazine ad pages slipped 4.6% in 2005, followed by a 14.4% slide in the first half of 2006.

According to BusinessWeek, AdAge, Alloy Media & Marketing, the Publishers Information Bureau and TNS Media Intelligence, that money isn’t going to a competing magazine – it’s going to a competing platform.

2005 ad revenues at TeenPeople.com sextupled over 2004. It is any wonder that Teen People (like Elle Girl a few weeks earlier) abandoned the magazine business to concentrate on their web presence?

The phenomenon is rippling . . .

• Video-game advertisers, traditionally a male-oriented lot, cut magazine spending from $46.1 million in 2002 to $28.8 million in 2005, while bumping web spending from $4.6 million to $12.6 million in the same period.
• Movie studios increased spending at Alloy Media & Marketing’s web outposts by 300% in three years.
• Industry folk were taken by surprise when Hachette Filipacchi Media U.S. announced it would close the book on Elle Girl while circulation and ad numbers were still rising. The move was preemptive: "The trend lines showed we weren’t going to see the light at the end of the tunnel in the time frame we needed," Hachette’s Jack Kliger told BusinessWeek.

All that said . . . There is a difference between a trend and a done deal.

AdAge cites a ComScore Media Metrix finding that traffic is currently down at branded teen magazine sites:

Seventeen.com dropped 26% year-to-year, from 807,000 unique visitors in May 2005 to 596,000 in May 2006.

ElleGirl.com was down 40%, from 208,000 in May 2005 to 124,000 in May 2006.

TeenPeople.com slipped 36% from 595,000 visitors in May 2005 to 383,000 in May 2006.

Q: So where are readers going if not from print to website?

A: They’re going from being readers to participants.

"MySpace represents a cultural shift in the way girls are communicating with each other," Atoosa Rubenstein, editor of teen juggernaut Seventeen Magazine, told Advertising Age just before securing a partnership with the 85 million-subscriber online behemoth. "It’s an important part of their lives so it has to be important to us."

I think Lady Clairol may be to blame.

In his landmark New York Magazine article, The ‘Me’ Decade, Tom Wolfe recalled the 1961 Clairol ad in which a woman said, “If I’ve only one life to live, let me live it as a blond.” There, in one line, Wolfe said, was the spirit of the age – our cultural zeitgeist. If I have only one life to live, let me live it . . . however I want, wherever I want, doing whatever I want, with whomever I want. Baby Boomers have pursued that ethos unapologetically for 45 years and more (because Clairol’s Agency didn’t invent that way of seeing, they found it and put it to words).

It turns out the kids learned it from us; only now the technology is there to take it farther, faster and with greater economic impact (turning on or turning off the cash faucet with blinding speed). This summer it appears kids are turning on the faucet for a five year-old clothing company called RVCA (the V is a roman script U; it’s pronounced Rue-cah). Look for RVCA on the body of a kid near you this fall (but don’t count on it being there a year from now).

This is why it’s hard to make money on print publications for adolescents – even if everything goes beautifully, publishers still have to pay for a completely new audience every 24 – 48 months as their customers age-out. This is also why high school graduation gift books are so lame – they’re designed to appeal to the aunts, uncles and grandparents who buy them – they might as well be blank inside.

What we can take to the bank is that content, design and participation are more important to the emerging generation of consumers than the media that deliver the goods. They will pay rock and roll money for consumables (where was the multibillion dollar ringtone business two years ago?) – exactly like their parents. If there’s an opportunity here, it’s for those who figure out ways to engage young consumers’ passion for participation. That makes product design an expensive arena in which to play (and most of us don’t have enough money or patience to make a go of it). But if you can engage kids with your service or experience they just might drag you into the future with them.