In your better moments, you may view young people as the future of the church; but for some of America’s largest corporations, young people are little more than an irresistible target market.
“The Merchants of Cool” is an intriguing, hard-hitting, and ultimately deeply disturbing PBS documentary about how corporate America is going after the largest and most lucrative generation of teens in history.
According to the show, these 32 million teens spend $100 billion a year and push their parents to spend another $50 billion, much of it “guilt money” designed to make up for the lack of family quality time.
The Market
Parents may neglect kids, but corporations certainly don’t. They bombard young people with millions of advertising messages a year, many of them delivered through the personal TV sets that 75 percent of kids watch in their rooms.
How do companies know what kids want to buy? They invest tons of money doing “cool hunting,” using an army of highly paid and professionally trained “culture spies” who interview young people to find out what’s cool, and then to find out how to sell it back to them.
In one of the documentary’s most intriguing segments, the producers tag along with a researcher from MTV who pays a visit to a New Jersey teen and conducts an “ethnography study.” The researcher asks the boy what kinds of clothes he has in his closet and what CDs and videos are his current favorites. The study is videotaped and played to the heads of the various MTV departments so they know the youngster’s hot buttons.
The segment illustrates the fact that while many parents and other adults rarely listen to young people or solicit their ideas, corporate leaders recognize such interactivity as a key to their success.
The Teen Subcultures
The program focuses on two specific youth subcultures: the mooks and the midriffs.
Mooks are those goofballs who watch TV shows such as “Jackass” and “South Park,” listen to shock jock Howard Stern, and buy tickets to movies starring gross-out king Tom Green. Reporter Douglas Rushkoff (who in an earlier life edited the book The Generation X Reader) says marketers “grab (the mooks) beneath the belt so they can grab their pockets.”
Midriffs are those prematurely adult girls who spend tons of money trying to look like Britney Spears and who follow this disturbing creed: “Your body is your best asset, so flaunt your sexuality even if you don’t understand it.”
The Corporate Perspective
The program also investigates the ways Coca-Cola has marketed its Sprite drink to kids. Once upon a time, Sprite was the least hip soft drink around, but that was before Coca-Cola hooked up with MTV and hip-hop music.
Today, Sprite organizes promotional events at “underground” music clubs, pays rap artists to perform and endorse its product and arranges for MTV to broadcast the whole thing as if it were actually a concert, not a commercial.
Sprite sponsors parties where kids get to hand out free CDs and has a Web site (Sprite.com) where kids can meet in chat rooms and try to win free prizes.
Professional cool-hunters are among the first Americans to identify emerging trends such as hip-hop. They were on the scene long before bands such as Limp Bizkit were big, and today they’re trying to figure out how to exploit fans of bands such as Insane Clown Posse, whose audiences are full of kids sporting black and white makeup.
The Trendsetters
Cool-hunters spend much of their time and energy trying to locate and understand the 20 percent of young people who set the trends. After separating leaders from followers like so many sheep and goats, the cool-hunters then help corporations sell the latest trends to kids through products, clothing and entertainment software.
Cool-hunters try to find what the trend-setting kids like and sell it to everybody else. Ultimately, the teen rebel is simply another product that constantly is recycled and resold to the next generation of young people trying to find out how to be cool.
The Response
For years, many youth groups have been using pop culture artifacts such as music, movies and TV shows to get kids talking about the entertainment industry’s hidden values.
What’s shocking is how seldom Christian teachers and leaders tackle subjects such as advertising and marketing, which are at the heart of our consumer culture and which in recent years have been targeting younger and younger kids.
That may be changing. Last year, during the months before the November elections, congressional leaders and presidential candidates condemned movie studios for targeting young people with advertising for violent and sexually explicit R-rated movies.
More recently, a group of concerned mothers and their supporters issued a “Mothers’ Code” designed to protect children from predatory advertisers. The code calls upon advertisers to voluntarily adopt the following six commitments:
1) No advertising, marketing or market research in schools, including high schools.
2) No targeting advertising and marketing to children under the age of 8.
3) No product placement in movies and media programs targeted at children and adolescents.
4) No behavioral science research to develop advertising and marketing aimed at children and adolescents.
5) No advertising and marketing directed at children and adolescents that promote an ethic of selfishness and a focus on instant gratification.
6) Good faith efforts to reduce sponsorship of gratuitously sexual and/or violent programming likely to be watched by children (“Watch Out for Children” can be downloaded at Rebelmothers.org. The site also contains all of the original signers of the statement, as well as the opportunity for others to add their names to this statement).
Will It Work?
It’s still too early to tell if corporate America will adopt the “Mothers’ Code”; but I, for one, am not holding my breath. The teen market is simply too large and lucrative; and in America’s competitive entertainment environment, companies who do limit advertising to children will lose market share to other companies that aren’t so principled.
In the meantime, the best thing leaders can do is help their young people begin to understand some of the ways corporations are hunting them down and trying to grab their dollars. One doesn’t need to have an MBA; simply adding advertising to the pop culture topics discussed in your group is a good way to start. By examining the advertising in some of your kids’ magazines and the commercials on some of their favorite TV shows, you’ll help some kids be less vulnerable and more prepared for the consumerist onslaught.
You may also want to buy a copy of “The Merchants of Cool” and show it to your group. It’s available from PBS video by calling 1.800.645.4727. There is also a teacher’s guide available.
