In the documentary Merchants of Cool,

In the documentary Merchants of Cool, the audience is taken through the lives of teenagers in a social, cultural, and economic perspective. The documentary focuses on the relation between popular culture and sociology. It looks at the way marketers work at convincing teenagers to buy their products and the results of this targeted advertising on the said youths. The documentary puts across that the commercialization of teen culture has corrupted and distorted it leaving teenagers struggling to find an identity.

Merchants of Cool begins by pointing out that today teenagers are the biggest consumer demographic in America. They number at 33 million strong, and at $150 billion they lead the pack in consumer spending. Teenagers have a lot of reserve spending cash, and adolescents alone account for approximately two-thirds of this figure. Furthermore, teenagers have the ability to influence their parents to buy products. Marketing usually involves a great deal of survey research, which is one of the primary goals of sociology. Through market research coupled with how impressionable teenagers are, they become a very easy target to manufacturers.

In their quest to capture the teen demographic, major marketers have engaged the services of independent market researchers. Through the use of sociological principles in studying the teenagers, the researchers have come up with a variety of ways to influence young people into buying products. The primary way to capture the teen demographic has been to market ‘cool’. Cool refers to something that is fashionable, attractive, or impressive, and to teenagers, no other currency in their social context has greater value. Taking advantage of this trend, marketers have devised ways making their messages appear cool in the hopes it will resonate well with their target market, the teenagers.

Market research takes the form of identifying trends early and bringing them to the market. ‘Cool hunting’, as this phenomenon is popularly called, has proven to be very effective. Market researchers send correspondents into the field to identify cool kids. The correspondents are former cool kids themselves making it easier for them to identify the uniquely qualified teens. These trendsetters are interviewed, given a series of open survey questions about products, and their answers recorded. Thereafter, content analysis is done on the collected data with an aim of gaining insight into the inner workings of the teenage mind.

Additionally, cool hunting often involves under the radar marketing. Teenagers, ever so keen to establish the authenticity of their own scene, do not respond well to overt ad campaigns. To mitigate against the teenage preference, subtler advertising has been introduced. This takes the form of paying teenagers to recommend particular products to their friends in social media and online forums. Moreover, companies organize for events and during these events, they pay popular teenagers to show up in the company’s merchandise to make it look cool. The desired effect is that other teenagers will adopt the products they see their compatriots use. Of course, once the trends catch on, and product adoption has gone from early adoption and is well on the way to late adoption, cool moves on. Consequently, new research needs to be done to identify the new cool. By watching and researching the youth, carefully crafting an image around what they have observed and selling that image back to the teenagers as ‘cool’, the media companies have drawn teenagers into a giant feedback loop none of them seem to realize what they are in.

Many people argue the media is a mirror that merely reflects the “real” world. Some people differ, claiming the media influences and creates what it wants the “real” world to be. Looking at the ownership of the major media outlets provides powerful insights into which of the two claims is true. The five biggest media companies NewsCorp, Disney, Vivendi Universal, Viacom, and AOL Time Warner have a much-diversified portfolio with stakes in quite a number of companies. Consistent with the ideal of pushing their agenda, they use their media companies to advertise the other companies they own, and their products. This characterization of media companies is remarkably in line with the Conflict theory. The media companies continues to grow bigger and richer, while the ordinary consumer receives little or no benefit at all from the interaction.

While the manifest function of media companies may be to advertise products, their own or otherwise, the latent functions reveal a subversive and disturbing trend. Through portraying women as being physically perfect, the media has raised the bar, so to speak, to impossible levels. Teenage girls are constantly trying to live up to this impossible standard, often to a disastrous conclusion. The result is a loss of self-esteem. Furthermore, by portraying women in all stages of undress, the media has managed to cultivate a low image in teenage girls. The ‘Midriff’, as this portrayal has subsequently been referred to, together with the brash, rude, noisy, misogynistic male counterpart ‘the mook’, teenagers have never had worse examples for role models. Women have been objectified, and men bastardized, the results on the impressionable young minds being very clear. Moreover, these two caricatures lay the groundwork for teen rebellion. An unbiased look at the situation media companies have brought about makes the dysfunction readily apparent.

Further, and more disturbing, teenage rebellion has been regarded as just another product on sale. The media’s broad adoption and encouragement of teenage rebellion, and its subsequent commercialization is shamefully exploitative. Teenagers go out of their way to look for music, movies, and even films that have not been processed into popular culture, that is exclusively their own. It is in this way that teenagers feed their subculture and channel into it. What most do not realize, however, is how entrenched these media companies have become. From publishing, video production, music, and movies, these corporations have permeated every sphere of the entertainment industry. Quite often, the small recording studio that does the mastering for an independent artist is a subsidiary of the major media houses.

While the selection of these cool kids is not random, the generalizability of the results of such research is surprisingly insightful. Market researchers may be hard pressed to explain the observable trends. At face value, this may seem surprising or even unexpected. However, if we look at it from a purely sociological perspective, it is found to be consistent with the Thomas theorem. By defining a product as cool, it soon starts to develop a following. This simple observation accounts for why a non-representative sample, picking the cool kids, has been proven to be effective.

To conclude, teenagers are constantly subjected to a large number of advertisements on different products. These advertisements, while primarily meant to sell products, have had some serious and unintended side effects. Teenagers are left in a state of utter confusion, not being able to find a way out. We can, therefore, safely say that media has had a very profound impact on the lives of teenagers.