George Burns said, famously, that “it’s all about sincerity. If you can fake that, you’ve got it made.” And for the last half dozen years, on the success of their faux-reality series “Laguna Beach,” “The Hills,” and “The City” MTV has proven him right. But faced with flagging ratings and, apparently, a growing sense of their own irrelevance, they’ve decided to try the real thing.  The network announced last week that they were undertaking a creative overhaul, dropping a large portion of the network’s development staff and refocusing on, well, authentic reality programming. Weirdly, in this case, it’s an upgrade.

Cynically, we attribute the move to cost cutting, but let’s remember that MTV basically invented a generation (mine) and has since been smartly attentive to the zeitgeist. This is the network that gave us “The Real World” 10 years before reality TV hit the mainstream, that gave us “Unplugged” and “Yo! MTV Raps” long before Grunge and Hip-Hop became dominant musical and cultural influences, and that, sure, gave us “Laguna Beach” and “My Super Sweet 16″ at least a little before the moment of materialism swept through youth culture.  So, when MTV Head of Programming Tony DiSanto claims that this was purely a creative decision, a response to a downtick in ratings, I’m inclined to listen. What’s interesting to me, and pertinent to what we do, is the rational behind the change.  DiSanto claims

“the slippage can be attributed to the generational shift of MTV viewers, with the channel’s brass focusing on the new teens and twentysomethings, “the millennials.”

DiSanto called them “the transparent generation” and said MTV’s development is being altered to appeal to them. “They don’t want to see a reality show that feels produced or is film-like,” he said. “It’s got to be real, authentic.”

He points to the recently premiered “16 and Pregnant” as an example of the type of unscripted fare that MTV is now after and touts it as one series that could fuel a turnaround.

We’ve long held Authenticity and Transparency as key tenets of Social Media strategy. It’s interesting that those ideals are beginning to now effect the strategies of broadcast media when targeting a generation that’s been growing up in Facebook – a generation that has, through just the sheer quantity of information it has easy access to, become somewhat resistant to manipulation.  Fifteen years ago, when the internet was first influencing my generation, there was alot of conversation about our “Digital Lives,” about what happens, what we choose to become when afforded the anonymity of online communication. A generation later, that idea has become basically irrelevant. When we engage with electronic media, with social media, and, yes, apparently with mass media we expect that what we see is what we get.