The Merchants of cool - documentary

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MERCHANTS OF COOL (2001)
Teenagers are corporate Americas 150 billion dollar dream. Teens have money and are willing to spend it therefore companies are more than willing to create a product which targets teens. Companies such as MTV, Maddison avenue and dream-makers of hollywood have all done so.They see teens as a continent which they are colonising (e.g. Africa). If companies fail to recognise their needs and wants they will be left behind. However what does this focus on teens do to the culture?

Companies will do whatever they think will work fastest and with the most people, meaning they will drag standards to the teenagers themselves. Corporate America is trying to find out teenager likes, wants, desires or in other words, what they wear, what they eat, how they spend their free time etc. Finding this information (or what's cool) is worth a lot of money. With 32 million teens, this is one of the biggest markets. Besides that, teens nowadays have more money and more say over how they will spend it that ever before, mainly because their parents are wanting to please their kids more an more now.

Teens are now (2001) growing up in a world full of marketing. A single American teen will process around 3000 discrete adverts in a day, or 10 million by the time they're 18. 75% of teens have a television in their room and 33% have their own computer. They spend an average of 2 hours online per day. There is a blizzard of brands, all competing for the same kids, therefore companies study them in depth in order to be able to create a product or service which targets them best. Teens don't operate like the rest of us, they're stubborn and don't respond the the classical marketing messages. However they do respond to 'cool'.  However cool keeps changing, making it hard to map it.  The search of what is cool has its own name -> cool hunting. Many companies don't trust themselves with cool hunting as they feel unable to do so, hence they hire experts to pin point these patter (of cool) early on.  These experts look for kids which are ahead of the pack as they will influence what everyone else does. These kids are called the trans-setters (they are the 20%), they influence the other 80% of the kids. Known cool hunters such as Gordon (founder of LookLook) have put together a team of young insightful people, all former teens themselves. They are culture spies, they penetrate the teen market where corporations aren't welcome. A correspondent is a person who has been trained to find transmitters, the teens which catch on to trends early on. These are the teens which are froward thinkers and look for inspiration past their back yard. The leaders within their own group. These kids are very difficult to find. These correspondents find these kids, get them interested in what they do, interview them and find out about their wants. All of which they post on their website (look-look) and then sell the access code (costing 20,000 per year) to other companies).  These kids are important because they catch on to trends which are still underground and are the first ones to bring it into the market.  The consumer then picks it up, runs with it and then eventually kills it. That is the paradox of cool hunting. It kills what it finds. Something is cool until it is found and over-used. Once it is everywhere, it looses its cool. As soon as marketers discover cool, it stops being cool. As soon as you pick up on these trends and reveal them to corporate america the more you force the founders to move on to something else.  There is no solution to this, its an ever-going process.

This creates a problem to marketers, they are seen as the enemy. Hence they market to kids without seeming to do so. They try to become cool themselves, like sprite did a few years ago. What sprite found out when talking to teens is that they have seen so much advertising that they were on overload. Hence they became very cynical of the traditional approach to advertising. Therefore Sprite issued a campaign where in their adverts they were making fun of advertising themselves. These adverts were implying that the audience (the teens) were smarter than the adverts and appeared to be on their side. However after a while kids grew sceptical and grew against this non marketing, marketing campaign. So sprite moved onto genuine cool. Focussed on hiphop, which became a way to talk to teens and gain access to their world. They weren't selling the product, they were selling the fact that they understood the culture, the lifestyle.  Whereas other companies focus on under the radar marketing. They ask kids to post on blogs and online as just another fan of their company or service. The also ask freshmen to throw parties which they would sponsor and get the kids to hand out their products. These companies helped sprite to find these kids and smuggle their message into their market. Sprite and hiphop thereafter became one and the same, each carrying the other to its audience. Sprite wasn't just associated with hiphop anymore, it was a part of it.

Is it weird to look back and ask whether the thing we called youth culture wasn't just something that was being sold to us but that it was something that came from us. An act of expression rather than consumption. Today (2001) 5 companies are responsible for selling nearly all of the youths culture (these are the true merchants of cool): News corporation, Disney, Viacom, Universal vivendi and Time warner. These large entertainment companies sell 90% of americas music and own almost all of the TV channels. They are looking to take over the teen market and their weaponry is clothing, amusement parks, sports teams etc etc etc. Of these 5, the coolest one is Viacom, and their most prized possession-> MTV. In 2000 it earned 1 billion dollars in profits. Itv, created 20 years ago, with a simple but effective commercial concept. To use record companies commercial music videos as creative programming. Since then the cable marketing channel has grown into a youth marketing empire. Everything on MTV now, is a commercial. This strategy keeps MTV's airwaves filled with cheap and easy content. Eg. sprites hiphop party was broadcasted on MTV.  Sprite rents an arena and pays 50 bucks per kid, to fill it up and look cool whereas the rappers and dancers get a direct plug on MTV's show, for which sprite is a sponsor. MTV gobbles up the cheap programming, promoting the music of the record companies who advertise on their channel.  However while this cross promotional free for all might maximise profits for MTV and Viacom it also violates the first rule of cool; don't let your marketing show. Therefore MTV learned this a few years ago when their rating began to fall. Mtv realised that they would have to change along with kids to remain cool.  They decided to make a better connection with the teens and what they want, in order to create a better MTV. The new itv is learning about what kids want and delivering it to them. MTV started playing the top 10 artists and invited them ver for guest appearances, or in other words handed over what was on their channel to the audience. To ensure Mtv stays strong, they must know where teen culture is moving. Mtv researchers went out to visit kids and their biggest fans in order to study them in the hope of understanding their demographic.  All this research isn't focussing on the kid as a person but as a customer. Miv's corporate revenues depend on being ahead of the curve. Corporations such as itv have to find out what the customer is thinking to be able to give them what they want. Itv doesn't listen to the young so it can make them happier, it listens to the young to figure out how it can pitch what Viacom has to sell. What is happening in the industry now is that there are fewer owners but more an more choices. So the companies have to desperately find ways to keep people, they also don't have a huge time frame to establish an identity. This puts pressure on channels like Mtv, to develop something which the audience will recognise right away and stay there to watch it (instead of changing the channel). When you have a few huge TNC's all loaded with debt, competing madly for brain space, they are going to do and take what they believe works the fastest and with the most people.

Media has now created two characters, one appealing mainly to the boys, called the Mook, and one to the girls , called the midriff. The Mook is arrested in adolescence whereas the Midriff is prematurely adult. He doesn't care what people think of him, and she is consumed by appearances. The midriff is just a collection of the same old sexual cliche's, re-packages as a new female empowerment. Britney Spears is a good example of a midriff. At the VMA's in 2000 she pretty much stripped naked, not only pleasing the boys but delivering a powerful message to the girls-> your body is your best asset. This is the message that matters the most as Britney's fans are mostly teenage girls.