Millennials Age" editorial coined the phrase "Generation Y" to describe those who were aged 11 or younger as well as the teenagers of the upcoming ten years who were defined as different from Generation X. According to journalist Bruce Horovitz, in 2012, "Ad Age" "threw in the towel by conceding that millennials is a better name than Gen Y", and by 2014, a past director of data strategy at "Ad Age" said to NPR "the Generation Y label was a placeholder until we found out more about them". Millennials are sometimes called "Echo Boomers", due to their being the offspring of
Baby boomers genuinely expecting the world to improve with time. They were also the generation that received peak levels of income; they could therefore reap the benefits of abundant levels of food, apparel, retirement programs, and sometimes even "midlife crisis" products. The increased consumerism for this generation has been regularly criticized as excessive. One feature of the boomers was that they have tended to think of themselves as a special generation, very different from those that had come before or that has come afterward. In the 1960s, as the relatively large numbers of young people became teenagers and young adults, they, and