Yes, friends, there's a war going on and, as far as America's youth culture is concerned, you are the enemy.
How did we find ourselves in such a predicament? Easy. Today, there are 32 million teens in the United States, spending 100 billion dollars on themselves every year. You want this money, and they know it.
There are a lot of you out there. This makes your job tricky. With kids processing an average of 3000 discreet advertisements each day, competition for their attention is fierce. Logically, you've invested heavily in research and trend-watching in order to find out what they'll respond to. You need to determine what they think is cool today and, more importantly, what they can be made to think is cool tomorrow.
It's a process that began in the 1980's, when kids' disposable income finally surpassed their parents' and the demographic took on paramount importance in consumer sales. You began to study teens like an anthropologist would study a foreign culture -- all in the hope of eventual colonization.
You hired cool-hunters -- young, bright, culture spies who could roam freely and undetected through the clubs and schoolyards where corporations weren't welcome. They came back with snapshots of the latest, undiscovered trends. Then you incorporated these tidbits into your styles or advertisements. A cuffed leg here, an eyebrow piercing there, maybe a new breakbeat from the rave scene.
But you were fighting a losing battle. The minute a cool trend is discovered, repackaged, and sold to kids at the mall, it's no longer cool. So the kids turn to something else, and the whole process starts all over again. The better you get at coolhunting, the faster the cycle goes, and the harder it is for anyone to keep up.
Making matters worse, kids were becoming increasingly aware of this process. They knew that their own claim to a trend is challenged by its adoption into the mainstream, so they looked for ways to hide from your researchers' hunting scopes.
By the early 90's, the so-called Generation X believed they had found their defense against you: adopt a posture and lifestyle that resists the notion of cool itself. These self-proclaimed slackers followed Bart Simpson's lead, and treated every marketing message with good dose of protective irony. They refused to be intimidated into buying the latest styles of jeans or running shoes, opting instead for the ugliest clothes they could find at the local thrift shop. Grunge style, like grunge music, was a revolt against marketing itself.
It was accompanied by a new attitude towards media and advertising: detachment. Armed with a remote control and a media-savvy awareness, teens of the early 90's celebrated their newfound freedom by surfing away from your TV ads, or laughing at them, out loud, with their friends. Phrases like "whatever" and "nevermind" announced this generation's refusal to be drawn into their predecessors' pursuit of cool. They would not be moved.
Major record labels were the first to find a way to capitalize on even this trend. Grunge bands were offered contracts that even they couldn't refuse, and soon Nirvana or Pearl Jam were as likely to be on MTV as Madonna. Kurt Cobain's suicide, though actually a result of depression and drug abuse, to kids symbolized his remorse at surrendering to the corporate machine. It effectively ended the creative expression of this resistance, leaving only its hollow irony behind.
This made Generation X ripe for harvest by mass consumer brands like Sprite and Levi's, who developed commercials applauding kids for their hatred of marketing. "Image is Nothing, Thirst is Everything," Sprite's new advertisements proclaimed. They hired famous basketball players to pitch the product in TV commercials, while bags of money representing their endorsement fees accumulated at the bottom of the screen. "We know you hate marketing," these campaigns meant to say. "We're on your side."
Of course teens eventually got wise to this anti-marketing marketing campaign, as well. Sprite's own focus groups revealed that kids saw through the charade. But it was a turning point in teen's defense against media: irony no longer guaranteed protection. It didn't really matter, though. Most of you had given up on this age group, and had trained your sights on their younger brothers and sisters. And you wouldn't make the same mistakes again.
The marketing industry vowed that Generation Y would not get away as easily. They hired psychologists and sociologists to project what kinds of teens these kids were going to be -- before they were even teens! This way you could be there, waiting for them. Your ethnographers and culture gurus had determined, correctly, that what these kids wanted more than anything else was a feeling of authenticity. Everything had gotten so confusing, so marketed, so fleeting, that it was hard to feel real about anything at all.
If it's authenticity they want, it's authenticity you'll provide them. So, today, you mine the farthest reaches of teen culture for signs of genuine trends. You send researchers into their bedrooms to scour their closets, or into fledgling new scenes that have yet to discover what they're about. Better yet, look at what the poor kids are doing, or how the urban (read: African-American) kids are dressing. Their anguish is real; so, too, must be their uses of denim.
Generation Y knows that your culture scouts are far better equipped than they are to determine what's authentic. So they watch MTV and peruse the ads in Spin to find out which culture they should emulate next. The object of the game is to get in on a scene while it's still being exploited. To get onto Total Request Live or be captured by the cameras on MTV's Spring Break. After all, if there's MTV cameras around, it *must* be cool.
For as much as they resent the way you pander to their fleeting sense of what is genuinely, authentically cool, they enjoy all the attention. It's turned into a giant feedback loop: you watch kids to find out what trend is "in," but the kids are watching you watching them in order to figure out how to act. They are exhibitionists, aware of corporate America's fascination with their every move, and delighting in your obsession with their tastes. At least to a point.
The problem with being the center of attention is that it gives them nowhere to turn, themselves. When even their parents long for the adolescent sexual utopia of the Abercrombie and Fitch catalogue or the idyllic and equally adult-less Dawson's Creek, kids have nothing left to aspire towards. None of them are experiencing anything close to the good times suggested by these brand-image universes. They are teenagers, for God's sake. It's a terrible, terrifying time. But they have been put at the very center of the universe. Marketers want to please them. Their parents want to *be* them. All eyes, and all cameras, are trained on the teen.
In most societies, teens tend to emulate adults. That's right: they yearn for the increased responsibilities and privileges that come with growing up. Until they grow up, they are on their parents' trip. It's not that children should be seen and not heard. But by turning the media and marketing realms into tributes to the teen revolution, you have cast everyone else as their enemies.
And by removing yourselves -- yes, you adults -- from the equation, you have denied your young customers the one thing they could really use from you: your adult creativity. Instead, you relegate kids to a prison of mirrors, and rationalize that you're simply meeting popular demand. You're not. Kids don't really know what they want. How could they? They're just kids. If anything, they want direction -- and connection with something greater than themselves.
Instead of dedicating your budgets to exacerbating this problem by drawing ever-tighter circles of teen research, have you considered spending it on designers, instead? Let your own studios and workshops become the locus of discovery, not some photographs on a trend-watching web site. Dare you lead, instead of follow?
Instead of identifying a trend and then mass-producing it before it has had a chance to mature into something of depth, why don't you develop some trends of your own? Spend your scouting money identifying new designers and then fostering their talents. If you simply *must* capture the vitality of youth, why not bring in kids as interns or apprentice designers? Let them learn from your best senior people, so that instead of re-inventing teen fashions every season, you build a legacy.
How can teens develop their own culture when each new idea is co-opted and sold back to them before it's had a chance to mature? I know your revenues depend on staying ahead of the curve, but that curve has come full circle. The very coolest thing in a world where nothing lasts is continuity itself. That's why 60's, 70's and 80's clothing revivals are happening with such disarming regularity. Kids are aching for something with more longevity than the current marketing cycle affords them. Don't adults have anything to offer them besides a mirror?
If you, the leaders of the design industry, are not in a position to create the defining trends of the 21st Century, then who is? Don't look to kids for all the answers. Look to yourselves.
How Marketers Outsmart Our Media-Savvy Children
London Times
I was in one of those sports "superstores" the other day, hoping to find a pair of trainers for myself. As I faced the giant wall of shoes, each model categorized by either sports affiliation, basketball star, economic class, racial heritage or consumer niche, I noticed a young boy standing next to me, maybe 13 years old, in even greater awe of the towering selection of footwear.
His jaw was dropped and his eyes were glazed over - a psycho-physical response to the overwhelming sensory data in a self-contained consumer environment. It's a phenomenon known to retail architects as "Gruen Transfer," named for the gentleman who invented the shopping mall, where this mental paralysis is most commonly observed.
Having finished several years of research on this exact mind state, I knew to proceed with caution. I slowly made my way to the boy's side and gently asked him, "what is going through your mind right now?"
He responded without hesitation, "I don't know which of these trainers is _me_." The boy proceeded to explain his dilemma. He thought of Nike as the most utilitarian and scientifically advanced shoe, but had heard something about third world laborers and was afraid that wearing this brand might label him as too anti-Green. He then considered a skateboard shoe, Airwalk, by an "indie" manufacturer (the trainer equivalent of a micro-brewery) but had recently learned that this company was almost as big as Nike. The truly hip brands of skate shoe were too esoteric for his current profile at school - he'd look like he was "trying." This left the "retro" brands, like Puma, Converse and Adidas, none of which he felt any real affinity, since he wasn't even alive in the 70's when they were truly and non-ironically popular.
With no clear choice and, more importantly, no other way to conceive of his own identity, the boy stood their, paralyzed in the modern youth equivalent of an existential crisis. Which brand am I, anyway?
Believe it or not, there are dozens, perhaps hundreds of youth culture marketers who have already begun clipping out this article. They work for hip, new advertising agencies and cultural research firms who trade in the psychology of our children and the anthropology of their culture. The object of their labors is to create precisely the state of confusion and vulnerability experienced by the young shopper at the shoe wall - and then turn this state to their advantage. It is a science, though not a pretty one.
Yes, our children are the prey and their consumer loyalty is the prize in an escalating arms race. Marketers spend millions developing strategies to identify children's predilections and then capitalize on their vulnerabilities. Young people are fooled for a while, but then develop defense mechanisms, such as media-savvy attitudes or ironic dispositions. Then marketers research these defenses, develop new countermeasures, and on it goes. The revolutionary impact of a new musical genre is co-opted and packaged by a major label before it reaches the airwaves. The ability of young people to deconstruct and neutralize the effects of one advertising technique are thwarted when they are confounded by yet another. The liberation children experience when they discover the Internet is quickly counteracted by the lure of e-commerce web sites, which are customized to each individual user's psychological profile in order to maximize their effectiveness.
The battle in which our children are engaged seems to pass beneath our radar screens, in a language we don't understand. But we see the confusion and despair that results - not to mention the ever-increasing desperation with which even three-year-olds yearn for the next Pokemon trading card. How did we get in this predicament, and is there a way out? Is it your imagination, you wonder, or have things really gotten worse?
Alas, things seem to have gotten worse. Ironically, this is because things had gotten so much better.
In olden times - back when those of us who read the newspaper grew up - media was a one-way affair. Advertisers enjoyed a captive audience, and could quite authoritatively provoke our angst and stoke our aspirations. Interactivity changed all this. The remote control gave viewers the ability to break the captive spell of television programming whenever they wished, without having to get up and go all the way up to the set. Young people proved particularly adept at "channel surfing," both because they grew up using the new tool, and because they felt little compunction to endure the tension-provoking narratives of storytellers who did not have their best interests at heart. It was as if young people knew that the stuff on television was called "programming" for a reason, and developed shortened attention spans for the purpose of keeping themselves from falling into the spell of advertisers. The remote control allowed young people to deconstruct TV.
The next weapon in the child's arsenal was the video game joystick. For the first time, viewers had control over the very pixels on their monitors. A terrain that was formerly the exclusive province of the BBC presenter was now available to anyone. The television image was demystified.
Lastly, the computer mouse and keyboard transformed the TV receiver into a portal. Today's young people grew up in a world where a screen could as easily be used for expressing oneself as consuming the media of others. Now the media was up-for-grabs, and the ethic, from hackers to camcorder owners, was "do it yourself."
Of course, this revolution had to be undone. Television and internet programmers, responding to the unpredictable viewing habits of the newly liberated, began to call our mediaspace an "attention economy." No matter how many channels they had for their programming, the number of "eyeball hours" that human beings were willing to dedicate to that programming was fixed. Not coincidentally, the channel surfing habits of our children became known as "attention deficit dissorder" - a real disease now used as an umbrella term for anyone who clicks away from programming before the marketer wants him to. We quite literally drug our children into compliance.
Likewise, as computer interfaces were made more complex and opaque - think Windows 98 - the do-it-yourself ethic of the Internet was undone. The original Internet was a place to share ideas and converse with others. Children actually had to use the keyboard! Now, the World Wide Web encourages them to click numbly through packaged content. Web sites are designed to keep young people from using the keyboard, except to enter in their parents' credit card information.
But young people had been changed by their exposure to new media. They constituted a new "psychographic," as advertisers like to call it, so new kinds of messaging had to be developed that appealed to their new sensibility.
Anthropologists - the same breed of scientists that used to scope out enemy populations before military conquests - engaged in focus groups, conducted "trend-watching" on the streets, in order to study the emotional needs and subtle behaviors of young people. They came to understand, for example, how children had abandoned narrative structures for fear of the way stories were used to coerce them. Children tended to construct narratives for themselves by collecting things instead, like cards, bottlecaps called "pogs," or keychains and plush toys. They also came to understand how young people despised advertising - especially when it did not acknowledge their media-savvy intelligence.
Thus, Pokemon was born - a TV show, video game, and product line where the object is to collect as many trading cards as possible. The innovation here, among many, is the marketer's conflation of TV show and advertisement into one piece of media. The show is an advertisement. The story, such as it is, concerns a boy who must collect little monsters in order to develop his own character. Likewise, the Pokemon video game engages the player in a quest for those monsters. Finally, the card game itself (for the few children who actually play it) involves collecting better monsters - not by playing, but by buying more cards. The more cards you buy, the better you can play.
Kids feel the tug, but in a way they can't quite identify as advertising. Their compulsion to create a story for themselves - in a world where stories are dangerous - makes them vulnerable to this sort of attack. In marketers terms, Pokemon is "leveraged" media, with "cross-promotion" on "complementary platforms." This is ad-speak for an assault on multiple fronts.
Moreover, the time a child spends in the Pokemon craze amounts to a remedial lesson in how to consume. Pokemon teaches them how to want things that they can't or won't actually play with. In fact, it teaches them how to buy things they don't even want. While a child might want one particular card, he needs to purchase them in packages whose contents are not revealed. He must buy blind and repeatedly until he gets the object of his desire.
Worse yet, the card itself has no value - certainly not as a play-thing. It is a functionless purchase, slipped into a display case, whose value lies purely in its possession. It is analogous to those children who buy action figures from their favorite TV shows and movies, with _no intention of ever removing them from their packaging!_ They are purchased for their collectible value alone. Thus, the imagination game is reduced to some fictional moment in the future where the will, presumably, be resold to another collector. Children are no longer playing. They are investing.
Meanwhile, older kids have attempted to opt out of aspiration, altogether. The "15-24" demographic, considered by marketers the most difficult to wrangle into submission, have adopted a series of postures they hoped would make them impervious to marketing techniques. They take pride in their ability to recognize when they are being pandered to, and watch TV for the sole purpose of calling out when they are being manipulated. They are armchair media theorists, who take pleasure in deconstructing and defusing the messages of their enemies.
But now advertisers are making commercials just for them. Soft drink advertisements satirize one another before rewarding the cynical viewer: "image is nothing," they say. The technique might best be called "wink" advertising, for its ability to engender a young person's loyalty by pretending to disarm itself. "Get it?" the ad means to ask. If you're cool, you do.
New magazine advertisements for jeans, such as those created by Diesel, take this even one step further. The ads juxtapose imagery that actually makes no sense - ice cream billboards in North Korea, for example. The strategy is brilliant. For a media-savvy young person to feel good about himself, he needs to feel he "gets" the joke. But what does he do with an ad where there's obviously something to get that he can't figure out? He has no choice but to admit that the brand is even cooler than he is. An ad's ability to confound its audience is the new credential for a brand's authenticity.
Like the boy at the wall of shoes, kids today analyze each purchase they make, painstakingly aware of how much effort has gone into seducing them. As a result, they see their choices of what to watch and what to buy as exerting some influence over the world around them. After all, their buying patterns have become the center of so much attention!
But however media-savvy kids get, they will always lose this particular game. For they have accepted the language of brands as their cultural currency, and the stakes in their purchasing decisions as something real. For no matter how much control kids get over the media they watch, they are still utterly powerless when it comes to the manufacturing of brands. Even a consumer revolt merely reinforces one's role as a consumer, not an autonomous or creative being.
The more they interact with brands, the more they brand themselves.
If It's A Free Market, Why Does
it Cost So Much?
printed in Adbusters no.34, 1999
Sure, in the suburban sprawl schema, the Weber Grill company gets to sell a whole lot more barbecues, but our experience of community is surrendered to the needs of the marketplace.
I've been making this argument for the past couple of years in articles and speeches around the US. Then, just last month, a libertarian magazine made a fascinating critique of my work that they believed should neutralize such anti-corporate sentiments: Those of us taking a stand against the marketplace as the dominant social paradigm are only doing so in order to make money!
That's right - the whole 'leftie' thing is a disingenuous scam to sell books, posters, and magazines like this one. We're actually in it for the profit.
What makes this argument particularly perplexing is that, if it were true, shouldn't the libertarians praise us? We would be adhering, after all, to the very principles they espouse! We are simply providing a product that meets consumer demand, and - because we don't really believe the rhetoric we spew - we are doing so without prejudice or forethought. We are as blameless as corporations selflessly catering to the will of the all-powerful consumer. Just like global conglomerates, we - the merchants of Marx - are simply appealing to a target market. In our case, we sell a hip, anti-consumerist aesthetic to people who fall into the Seattle Demonstrator psychographic.
This kind of circular, self-perpetuating analysis is symptomatic of a society getting itself into some serious ideological trouble. We are so inundated by the free market's rhetorical whitewash that we are fast approaching what can only be labeled "market fascism": a social contract that can no longer tolerate any opinion or event that doesn't serve the speculative economy. Its adherents can't understand motivation in any other terms than profit-mindedness; they can't imagine alternatives to the logic of capitalism. Those who can conceive of counter-currents become the latest-variety "enemy of the state." The state itself, of course, is to be reduced to the barest regulation required for the free flow of capital and protection of property. Market opponents must be eliminated or, better, assimilated. The bottom line really does become the bottom line.
Currently, trillions of dollars and man-hours are being spent to lock down just such a reality template. Through intimidation, reward, and an odd scheme of justifications, the market is yearning towards the status of sacred doctrine. While it's still permitted, let's deconstruct some of its sacred cows before they become our only source of milk.
The first faulty premise of market fascism is that consumption invariably leads to an expression of democratic will - that we vote with our dollars. In this sense, corporations conduct focus groups, polling, and other forms of cultural anthropology, and justify this information gathering as an effort to get to the heart of what people really want.
In reality, the results of such studies are divided into two categories: desires that can be monetized, and those that can't. If focus groups conducted by the music industry, for example, determine that kids want to hear songs made by their own neighbors, record labels do not rush to market songs by anonymous teens. Instead, they use this information to construct publicity campaigns for the groups they have already decided to back.
No, the reduction of the role of citizens to that of consumers does not translate into cash register democracy. It means that the scope of our influence has been reduced to very limited conversation with our marketers.
Market fascists dismiss such arguments, claiming that we are paranoid leftists, imagining a conspiracy between a group of fictitious marketers and corporate chiefs-- that such people do not really exist. In a sense, they are right. In the corporate reality, no one is in charge.
When you walk into the GAP, a young clerk will initiate a well-researched sales technique called GAPACT (Greet Approach Provide Add-on Close Thank). Should we be mad at her? Of course not. She's just doing what her manager has told her to do. If she doesn't end the day with a certain quota of multiple-item sales, she'll get in trouble. So do we blame her manager? No. He's got to meet a quota, too, set by corporate headquarters. Do we blame the marketing department? Well, they're just taking their orders from the CEO. And he's just taking his from the Board of Directors. And they're just listening to their shareholders. And those shareholders, well, they're some of the same people walking in the door as customers, who happen to have GAP stock in the mutual funds of their retirement plans.
The whole thing is on automatic. Although corporations may have the legal rights of human beings, they aren't human at all. A corporation is just a set of code - like a computer program - a recipe for making money. The human beings enacting the code, from executives to customers to marketers, become part of the machine.
Worse still, today we are empowering our corporations with the most advanced techniques of persuasion known to science. I'm not talking about discredited notions like subliminal advertising, but much more pernicious forms of influence, like neurolinguistic programming, regression and transference, pacing and leading, and other forms of hypnosis. Sure, marketers and advertisers have always used versions of these techniques, but never have we extended and automated them through computers and onto the Internet. The Internet gives the formerly abstract corporate entity its eyes and ears. Consumer feedback is instantaneously recorded, compiled, shared, and acted upon. There is no need for human intervention, or, of course, the conscience or ethical considerations that might slow any of this down. Sell more stuff in less time with higher profit is the only corporate command set.
Like most Adbusters' readers, I've spent a good deal of time examining how these techniques work. Suffice to say, the way to make people buy things they don't really want is by making them tense. In order to sell unnecessary goods, you must convince people they are unhappy so that they yearn to make their lives better - to fill in that sad vacuum. The plain truth is rarely put this plainly: A marketer's job is to make people unhappy.
And that gets us back to the oldest trick in the book for keeping people in line: take intimacy away from them. If a teenage boy is sitting on the couch next to his girlfriend, he's less likely to be persuaded to buy those jeans in the TV commercial. He's already getting laid! So what are the marketer's alternatives? Get the girl to worry about how her boyfriend's clothes reflect on her, or, better, find a way to keep the kids from having sex at all.
This all became stridently clear to me a few months ago, when I was asked to appear in a debate on CNN about censorship online. They had me up against a "family values" advocate. I was supposed to argue that the right to free speech outweighed the concerns of parents about what sorts of pornography their kids might stumble upon while surfing the web. As the debate went on, I realized we were all accepting the premise that kids should be protected from sexual imagery. What studies have ever been done to prove it's dangerous for kids to see pictures of people having sex? We let kids watch sitcoms in which parents regularly lie to one another - but we fear what will happen if they see people making love?
My point is not that kids should be exposed to porn. Rather, it is that the sacred truths we hold be self-evident are, in fact, blasphemous distortions of social reality intended to reduce thinking human beings into compliant consumers . This, combined with marketing techniques designed to limit human agency to impulsive Pavlovian responses, leads to an unthinking, unquestioning, and absolutely unfulfilled population, ripe for market fascism.
The irony here is that religion might actually serve as a last line of defense against this branded cultural imperialism. Adbusters' annual "Buy Nothing Day" used to occur once a week as a long-forgotten ritual called "Sabbath." Once every seven days, the Judeo-Christian founders concluded a few millennia ago, people should take a break from the cycle of consumption and production.
Imagine trying to practice Sabbath today. What's left to do that doesn't involve paying for admission? Are they any public spaces left other than the mall? Though the Sabbath was widely celebrated even 10 years ago, it now falls outside the imaginable for the market fascists: Wouldn't it throw the economy into a recession?
Perhaps, but it would also give us 24 hours each week to restore a bit of autonomy into our own affairs. The hard right has claimed the spiritual high ground (as a way of promoting market values) but it may actually belong to us. It's our way of disengaging from the corporate machine, unplugging from the matrix, and considering whether we would rather have a communal barbecue pit at the end of the block. It's not time off; it's time "on." It's a sacred space for the living. We might even use it to have sex.
What if we all decided to take our cues from kids?
November 1999
It's not easy being a marketer these days, especially a teen marketer. Budgets are down, the promises heralded by Internet commerce have all but vanished, and the kids themselves?those very kids who you are hoping to attract?hate you and everything you're trying to do to them. There are more than 32 million teenagers in the United States, spending $100 billion on themselves every year, and directly influencing the spending of another $50 billion by their parents. And, unlike most consumers, teens spend their money almost exclusively on luxury purchases such as music, designer clothes and movie tickets?purchases that have almost nothing to do with product attributes or intrinsic value, and everything to do with branding. This makes teens your holy grail: the ultimate target market. It's also why there are so many of you out there, desperately competing for their attention and their loyalty. You put an average of 3,000 television and print advertisements in front of the American teenager each day. It's a crowded media space. How can you make your brands appear cooler than anyone else's?
For most of you, the answer rests with research. You hire high-priced, young anthropologists armed with Polaroid cameras to follow teens around and document their activities, their piercings and their tattoos. Problem is, once you identify a new style or trend, you seize upon it and then pump it out across the breadth of the broadcast universe. Then it's no longer cool, but ubiquitous. So the kids move onto something else, and the cycle begins again.
If you put yourselves in the shoes of your customers, rather than simply noting which brand of sneaker they've purchased, you'd find out that just as you use all the tools at your disposal to trap them, they use everything at theirs to avoid you. Kids armed with remote controls surf away from your paid programming as soon as they can identify it as marketing. The way around that seems to be to turn entertainment into marketing. Movies and television programs are themselves extended commercials for the rock groups, fashions and lifestyles appearing in them. MTV is an end-to-end advertisement; there's no need to cut to commercial because the programs are themselves ads, often paid for by the company or film studio whose product is being featured.
You closed the loop. Even teen rebellion is a marketing trend, sold to kids in the form of rage rock bands like Limp Bizkit or faux sexual liberation icons like Britany Spears. But today's coolest cool kids are learning to see corporations and consumption as the enemy. Witness the news footage of demonstrators outside World Trade Organization meetings. It would seem that there's no winning. But what if the job of marketers isn't to predict teen trends, but to create real possibilities for new ones?
If so, the alternative would be to seek out or even conceive new companies that are making products or creating experiences of genuine value. It's been done before. Take video games.. In 1998, the industry took the business world by surprise by surpassing Hollywood in total revenue and profits. It happened organically: Games provided kids with an alternative media experience?one where their interaction encouraged skills such as problem-solving and learning new interfaces. Many games offered kids the ability to create their own worlds. Video games were empowering.
Larger corporations took notice of this thriving electronic subculture and began applying conventional wisdom to an unconventional business. Instead of relying on the game culture and its community of diehard fans to develop new games and ideas--as they had been--game companies got greedy and impatient. They began to leverage existing media properties, such as TV and movie characters, into games instead of inventing new ones. They began instituting high licensing fees and other barriers to development, so that young, independent shops could no longer develop for the major platforms. After all, this was now big business.
They conducted focus groups and market surveys, which led inevitably toward an emphasis on least-common denominators such as sex and violence. By adopting a top-down development scheme, they ended up destroying the bottom-up culture that they should have been nourishing. In short, they made the same mistake that almost everyone makes in marketing to kids: They destroyed the thing they should have been promoting. And, predictably, game revenues went down.
The way I see it, marketers have two choices. Either create products and brands with genuine value, or give young people the tools to develop their own. In order to recognize what's valuable, try to determine whether the product you're pushing comes from an organic culture. Skateboard clothes do; the manufactured fantasies of the Abercrombie and Finch catalog do not. Pogs and baseball cards appeal to an innate desire to collect, learn and trade. Pokemon cards exploit this desire by turning obsessive purchasing into a crucial part of the game.
Promote as much autonomy as possible. Think guitars, cameras, and editing systems. True, it's hard to brand creative experiences, and if young people are actually making videos and music for themselves, it could compromise their loyalty to Britney. But then again, maybe teens have something more to offer our society than their disposable income. Let's find out