Reaction Essay 2

Merchants of Cool

The media (in a roundabout way) is basically run by teens. They’re the ones with the money the corporations want. In 2001, teens alone spent over 32 billion dollars with an additional 50 billion by manipulating parents. Money has become the number one priority among teens; the more money, the more stuff, the happier you will be.

Marketers have caught on to this and have found ways to ‘Sell Cool.’ They look for the trendsetters (and former trendsetters to help) and use them to figure out what the majority are into. These findings are manipulated and exploited by marketers. Sprite has been the most successful company to do so. They are then able to adapt to what teens want and succeed in selling it back to them. They called it the Feed Back Loop; the teens see it on television or in ads, they pick it up, make it into a trend, and sell it back to the marketers. This has become so big, that real life and TV life are starting to blend together.

The thirteen year old girl, trying to become a model is a prime (but sad!) example. She accepted what society wanted and worked to achieve it. At the party for the modeling convention, she was dancing like those she saw in the music videos and shows (especially on MTV). She was selling what she saw back to the marketers.
Marketers and corporations have development ‘Mook’ and ‘Midriff’ to sort of embody males and female teens. Mook is the personification of the male; he is loud, crude and in-your-face. Midriff is the female character with her sexiness and premature adolescents. Marketers use these characters or traits of these characters in everything they produce; and the ratings are high.

Of course there are those who reject mainstream media. Teen rebellion has become a product of MTV; they take a band that only a few people or a certain subculture know, and ‘discover’ them. But even these cases are not safe for long. A corporation will see the potential profit then offer the group or person a deal and inject them into the mainstream; this takes away the originality form a group of teens. They want something is theirs but everything today is commercialized and sold back to them.

Teens today no longer ask “Why?” they just accept it because it is popular. It is almost sad that a thirteen year old girl is going to modeling conventions because she is told so much and so often that she has to be beautiful, or that the reason to buy Sprite is because they throw crazy parties and endorse the Hip-Hop culture.