For instance, doing marketing for higher ed, “hype” still appears to carry water with our older learners (the folks going back to school to train for a second or third career), while it doesn’t track at all with the prospective freshmen. The teen market (and increasingly, the 20-something market we belong to), is automatically suspicious of hype. Scads of articles have been written about the MTV generation, and how we’ve had to filter through ads all our lives. For the folks who don’t even remember when MTV played videos, it’s that much more. For them, hype is beyond dead; companies lie and they know it.

For the folks who are somewhat older, however, habits are hard to break. There’s more fatigue there than there was 10 or even 5 years ago, but it’s not gone. They don’t take it as a given that ads lie the way younger folks do. They also haven’t had the same kind of media saturation – and thus aren’t as efficient filterers. For them, “hype” really can work.