Gen-X 'attitude' A Real Cash-spinner

10/21/1996 

It's a new US market: the 50 million or so Generation Xers, sons and daughters of affluent baby boomers, who have money to spend - their parents' money - and, as ERIC ELLIS reports from Los Angeles, Corporate America is discovering them.

IN 1969, Charles Manson's followers infamously daubed "Helter Skelter" on the walls of a Bel Air mansion with the blood of the pregnant Sharon Tate whom they had just killed.

In 1996, the same man helps a funky fashion boutique in Los Angeles' too-cool Melrose Avenue sell clothes with "attitude". The link? Goatees are back, and murder monsters are cool with America's newest members of Generation X.

Charles Manson's evolution from pop icon to advertising icon may well be evidence of the disturbing American values that people like Malaysia's Dr Mahathir Mohamed and Singapore's Lee Kuan Yew say are infecting the world. Then again it might be the very stuff that they want to import from the US -creative entrepreneurship.

Steven Grasse, the 32-year-old millionaire whose Gyro Worldwide agency conceived the Manson campaign, has made millions identifying something that has largely eluded Corporate America for a decade - how to sell to a alienated generation.

As with any modern youth tribe, Generation X doesn't like to be pigeon-holed and resists any attempt to be put in a box, particularly a marketing one.

But with a population estimated by marketers at around 50 million, big companies are adapting campaigns to pick up Gen X and take them into the mainstream, maybe when Bill Clinton gets them a job.

"You've got to be part of it to get it in the head. But there's nothing scientific about it," Grasse says. "I'm surprised by how easy it is." It's a demographic Australian parents are more than familiar with. Gen X and their heirs are the largely jobless children of the baby boomers, siblings of yuppies raised on television with sharp consumer sensibilities but bumping up against the deep recessions of the late 1980s, early 1990s.

Where yuppie angst was not about getting a job, but what type, the 18-30 year-olds of Gen X may never have had one.

But that doesn't mean they don't have any money. Generation X has little personal overheads. They live longer at home because its cheaper and what cash they get is spent - wisely.

"They are very frugal. They know what is value for money and they don't feel like society owes them a living," says 30-year-old T.K. Knowles, whose LA-based Reactor Films makes many of Grasse's ads.

"They don't care much about the system and they are very suspicious of it. They know what's crap and what's not. If something doesn't work, they walk away very quickly."

Grasse's Gyro has done campaigns for RJR Tobacco, Pepsi, Grand Metropolitan Brands and Anheuser-Busch, brewers of the very mainstream Budweiser.

With RJR, Gyro resurrected a 1913 line of Camel cigarettes, and repackaged them in rebellious red, called them Red Kamel and plugged them with Sovietesque art.

It picked up on the Gen X-generated backlash against political correctness and came up with tag-lines like "Karen Didn't Like To Drink and Smoke and Curse. So She Just Smoked."

"These guys are sick to death of their fat and decayed mums and dads telling them not to drink, not to smoke or do drugs or whatever when they have done it for 30 years. They have a very sharp nose for hypocrisy."

That message is evident in a smart campaign that was perhaps wasted on a humble Philadelphia tanning salon. Illustrated with photos of Newt Gingrich and Michael Jackson, Gyro captioned the artwork, "Some People are Just Too White". It was a hit across all racial groups.

Provocative advertising is nothing new. Fashion chain Benetton has made headlines for years with its eye-opening campaigns.

But Grasse says his corporate credo is "to piss people off. We consider our work is well done when we get sued". That's something only Generation X would say.

Manson was only one in a line of history's monsters Grasse has employed in pursuit of Mammon. Another featured Jeffrey Dahmer, a mail-out of the Unabomber, a fashion print campaign parodied the mainstream-cool Gap chain with the line "Mussolini, Stalin, Saddam, Mao Tse-tung and Qaddafi all wore khakis".

Generation X heirs react against attempts to be labelled. Thus the film many people like to associate with Generation X, Winona Ryder's Reality Bites "sucks", according to Grasse, and the Internet is "over-hyped".

We like traditional values and Mad Max, Pulp Fiction and Trainspotting. We also like A Clockwork Orange." Grasse has a rather large opinion of himself and is what many might consider a "smart arse". "An agency like ours wouldn't happen in Australia because you guys aren't cool enough. The first one to do it will be ours and we will come down there and kick your butts," he says.