A Generation-defining cool brand lost the next cohort’s approval within a decade

Evidence

Vice, which expanded from print to video to online content, fell far short of CEO Shane Smith’s ambitious prediction of a 50 billion valuation by 2020. Rupert Murdoch’s 70 million investment in 2013, valuing Vice at $1 billion, still proved too optimistic. Vice may have won over older millennials, but the next generation hated it. A 2017 survey among teens found Vice to be the second-least-cool brand, even lower than Yahoo!. — W. David Marx, Blank Space, 517

Categorization

• QUESTION: Vice’s trajectory is a compact case study of how fast a ‘signature’ style aged — worth examining whether Marx uses this to define the generation boundary.