Millennials are making advertisers' lives harder by watching less TV than their predecessors

Advertisers and marketers spend a lot of time and money trying to figure out how to communicate with millennials. They are the first generation of so called "digital natives" and are arguably the most engaged group of consumers ever. As we can see in this chart from Statista, they also have very different media consumption habits than previous generations, and are an anomaly to advertisers desperate to reach them.

The old brass of advertising used to be able to broadcast a few good TV ads and be done, but as millennials slowly shift away from traditional electronic media and become more reliant on their phones they become harder to reach.

Advertisers are forced to rework their strategies for mobile applications like Instagram, Snapchat, and Facebook. This is totally new territory for many of them, and experimenting can lead to some pretty epic fails. Chrysler is infamous for accidentally tweeting out the F word on its official Twitter account, and Microsoft earned big eye rolls when it tried using dubstep in an ad. On the other hand, brands like Denny's have hit the nail on the head with a Twitter account that advertises new products and promotions using humor aimed at millennials.

Mike Nudelman/Business Insider