The Merchants of Cool

Teens make up a very large part of today’s market. 32 million teens with plentiful disposable income provided for the most part by their parents creates a massive empire to the tune of $150 billion. Since this is such a huge part of the spending market, corporations find it vital to understand and recognize what is considered “cool” among today’s teens. In 2001, author and media critic Douglas Ruskoff explored how trends are tracked in the show, “The Merchants of Cool”.
Not only do teens spend a lot of money, but they also spend on lot of time taking in media content. In addition, teens are bombarded daily by thousands of discrete ads. Corporations find it very useful to market themselves to this huge teen audience. In order to do this best, they must find out what the teens would be most interested in. Companies, such as Look-Look search for a “personality” that would sell. They call this “cool hunting”. By finding out who the trendsetters are and what trends are rising up, the cool hunters can make projections are market their products in the best possible way.
Advertisers have found that teens can see straight through a campaign scheme, so instead, they have found it more effective to have their products become part of a culture. Companies, such as Sprite, have combined corporation and culture, creating a new identity without appearing to try too hard. Sprite was heavily promoted by hip-hop artists (who were paid to do so) and the soft-drink immediately entered the minds of teens via the culture, not a campaign.
Viacom, one of the big five of media corporations, make a billion dollars in profit off of their television channel MTV. MTV is comprised mostly of cheap, easy to create content. They follow what they call “the rule of cool”, by not letting their marketing show. They often do their market research by going to the homes of a typical viewer and studying them in nearly all aspects of life. They feel the more they know about their customer, the better the connection they can make with them. This ifnography study creates a portrait of their teen audience that they can then turn into content on their channel. The “Mook” and the “Midriff” represent the things that boys and girls associate with. The “Mook” can be found in programming like professional wrestling and shows like Jackass, while the “Midriff” is all about the female appearance. MTV promotes raunchy behavior, as seen on their Spring Break programming to the point where it becomes unclear who is imitating who. Is the media reflecting the real life actions of the audience or is the audience just imitating what they see in the media? This feedback loop has gotten to a point where finding an answer to this is impossible.
For me personally, this is my last year being defined as a teenager. I have pretty much grown up watching things like MTV and being the one marketed by corporations. I can defiantly see where the media has had an impact on teens. When the media portrays certain things as being “cool” they do indeed become cool. Sometimes I wonder how trends would form if it weren’t for the media, but I guess that is a world we will never get to see.