parents

by jenks

taste the difference

…And I can make you wanna buy a product
Movers shakers and producers
Me and my friends understand the future
– The Flobots: “Handlebars”

I’ve been trying to get through Matt Mason’s The Pirate’s Dilemma for a while. It’s an easy read, but between digging up mind-blowing historical discoveries from the cultural strata–Did you know that a nun at the orphanage David Mancuso was raised at is pretty much responsible for modern dance culture? Dude, I know, it’s insane–And so many unconscious ironies and philosophical inconsistencies that I’m tempted to write a post after I finally do finish it called “The Pirate’s Contradiction”…. it’s difficult to read too much of it at a time.

There’s one very interesting section in it, however, that I think can be dealt with outside of the rest of the book. In keeping with the recent theme of musings on contemporary adulthood, here’s an excerpt from a section called “Parents Just Do Understand”:

The hip-hop generation was the first to grow up in a brand-saturated world. Before hip-hop, as Will Smith and DJ Jazzy Jeff once postulated, it was a given that parents just didn’t understand. But now parents who are the age of Smith have the same albums on their iPods as their kids, and the same reissued retro sneakers on their feet. This has serious ramifications for youth culture, commerce, and everything else.

…What does it mean now to “grow up” in a world where we all want a Nintendo Wii for Christmas?

BAM!

And while Mason presents the caveat that younger generations now find the outlet for rebellion through media and technology, that last bastion where parents and kids are still reliably segregated, in general his conclusion is that “The generation gap has become obsolete.”

But I wonder if perhaps it’s not quite that simple. Maybe the generation gap hasn’t gotten filled in and paved over, but has, in fact, gone deeper below the surface. From above, the divisions that would once define a generational cohort and distinguish it from its predecessors would appear to have eroded, but underneath, a different separation is very much intact.

A 2006 Rolling Stone article called “Teens Save Classic Rock” talks about how the genre of Hendrix, Floyd and Zeppelin is experiencing a resurgence among a whole new generation of kids. “We’re now seeing an audience that goes from sixteen to sixty,” said Allman Brothers manager Bert Holman.

The internet made this possible. iTunes means the music we can listen to is no longer determined solely by the offerings of an ever more homogenized radio, or limited to the finite selection of a physical record store. And while we can now instantly get to hear a bigger breadth of music from across genres and ages than was ever possible before, the question remains, as Rolling Stone points out, “Why would kids born in the Nineties turn to timeworn guitar anthems?”

One answer:

For all of the vibrant rock recorded in the past ten years — from pop punk to neogarage to dance rock — no new, dominant sound has emerged since grunge in the early Nineties. “I can’t think of a record recently that blew people’s minds,” says Jeff Peretz, a Manhattan producer and guitar teacher. “And there aren’t really any guitar heroes around anymore. Kids don’t come in and say, ‘I want to play like John Mayer.’”

“There is such a drought that kids are going back and rediscovering the Who and Sabbath,” says Paul Green, who runs the Paul Green School of Rock Music.

But I don’t think it’s a “drought” so much as a glut. Popular, contemporary music is so ominpresent and obvious there’s barely room for kids to even figure out if they like it. By default, it’s what they’re expected to be listening to. The hideaway of classic rock, where no doubt no one expected to find them, is a relished escape. The musical equivalent of disobeying your mom when she tells you “Just stay where I can see you.”

According to Rolling Stone, “9% of kids ages 12-17 listened to classic-rock radio in any given week in 2005 — marking a small but significant increase during the past three years, according to the radio-ratings company Arbitron.” It’s not just a sign of teen taste, it’s a sign of teen distinction. If you’re listening to classic rock in high school, you’re doing something the other 91% of the kids at your high school aren’t into, or onto yet. That’s some indisputable early adopter appeal there.

Which is perhaps the complete opposite of what appeals to adults about listening to the music of their own youth.

In a 2004 USA Today article about how Kids Are Listening To Their Parents’ Music, Jeremy Hammond, head of artist development at Sanctuary Records noted, “There’s not so much peer pressure to identify with a particular genre or even generation of music,” says “Back then, you had to choose a lifestyle associated with a genre. In England, you were in a gang of rockers or skinheads or Mods. Potheads wanted psychedelic music. Those boundaries are gone. [Now] It’s much more about defining one’s own unique tastes.”

The way a modern identity is constructed has changed. It’s no longer something as simple as how old we are that determines what is or is not “for us” to buy, or listen to, or dress like. The mechanics of taste is the next marketing frontier.

“I think the rebellion is that kids aren’t rebelling,” Says Rana Reeves, creative director of Shine Communications in The Pirate’s Dilemma. “They aren’t rebelling against the marketers; they want to be marketers.”

    



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by jenks

across the universe’s “discovery strategy” model

first, you need to watch the trailer for sony pictures’ across the universe: here. if you cannot be trusted to come back here afterwards, however, you can just watch the shittier-quality youtube version:

ok then. now that you have been adequately briefed, we can begin.

i first saw the trailer for across the universe on quicktime.com in march and was not only blown away by how stunningly imaginative the visuals looked, but actually–i swear!–brought to tears by the drama of 60’s-era youth struggle depicted in just 2.5 minutes of preview footage! needless to say, i saw the movie opening weekend, six months later, and left the theater feeling beyond satisfied. the movie was so visually innovative and different it was like i’d just witnessed julie taymor–the director-slash-visionary best known for broadway’s “the lion king”– reinvent the very concept of movie a little bit.

i then proceeded to tell all my friends they should check it out, and even posted the preview on facebook. i was somewhat startled to discover the incongruent presence on the movie’s otherwise fairly unimaginative site of a special link that allows for easy one-stop posting of the preview directly to facebook. either this was incredibly nuanced forethought, or obviously tacked-on afterthought, i figured.

last friday, the LATimes weighed in on that debate, asking: Is this the next cult sensation? as you may have noticed, across the universe is a musical about teenagers. and while the plot-line is punctuated by beatles’ tunes, the fact that this coming-of-age movie didn’t find an audience with middle-aged boomers, who were part of the original “beatlemania,” apparently came as a marketing newsfalsh:

To judge by “Universe’s” trailer, which began screening in front of “Spider-Man 3” in May, it wasn’t immediately clear which genre “Universe” belongs to. Is it a coming-of-age story? A rock opera á la “Moulin Rouge”? A surrealistic period piece? (Answer: all the above.) Worse for marketers at Sony, the film’s distributor, contractual obligations bound them from hitting home with “Universe’s” primary selling point.

“Yoko Ono, Paul [McCartney], Ringo [Starr] and [George’s widow] Olivia Harrison were all supportive of the film, but I couldn’t use the Beatles name in any advertising,” Taymor recalled. “That didn’t make things easy. And you can’t advertise that you have Bono, Eddie Izzard and Joe Cocker in cameo roles. We didn’t have a real big push from Sony; they were stumped by it. So nobody was really sure who the film’s audience was.”

i’m ten years older than the median teen-movie demo–but on the tail end of recovery from the quarterlife crisis the concept of trying to figure out life in a conflicted, confusing, “changing world” still feels totally relevant–and that’s, i think, the cutoff point for the audience to be marketing coming-of-age tales to.

After an uninspiring opening last month… help arrived in the form of an audience whose parents were their age when the first wave of Beatlemania hit. After three weeks in theaters, the PG-13 movie finally penetrated the top 10 by connecting with a zealous core constituency: teenage girls.

….According to Paul Dergarabedian, president of the box-office tracking firm Media by Numbers, audiences are now finding their way to “Universe” thanks to Sony’s textbook execution of what is known in the industry as a “platform release.”

“Expectations were unknown. But Sony has handled it perfectly. They got big initial interest in limited release, then they’ve been capitalizing on that every week.”

“They’re taking their time. On a movie like this, that’s what you have to do.”

so… like, besides the fact that the movie’s supercute cast is totally perfect bedroom-wall poster material, and that this “60’s story” is retold with acutely contemporary (and boomer-anachronistic) sensibilities…. did, um, no one at sony bother to check if maybe teenagers might not actually totally dig the beatles, at some point before they released the movie?

three and a half years ago (maybe somewhere around the time taymor got this funny idea for a musical) USA today reported:

Beatles historian Martin Lewis began spotting a young wave of Fab Four fanaticism as emcee of Beatlefan conventions the past 14 years. Boomers constituted half of the audience in 1990. Now 75% of attendees are under 30, and many barely in their teens.

As marketing consultant for The Beatles Anthology, he met with label execs plotting campaigns targeting fans 45 and up. “I’ve got news for you,” Lewis told them. “I’m the oldest guy at Beatlefan conventions.”

Sure enough, a marketing survey showed that the under-30 constituency scooped up 40% of the first Anthology run. “I’ve interviewed those kids,” Lewis says. “I’ve said, ‘Surely you’d rather listen to Justin Timberlake. Why are you here? Were you forced by your parents?’ But they chose to be there.”

the relative “drought” in contemporary rock (“Kids don’t come in and say, ‘I want to play like John Mayer,'” says a manhattan producer and guitar teacher quoted in a feb. 2006 article in rolling stone called “teens save classic rock“), multiplied by the internet’s universal ease of access to music of all decades, means you better do your homework about whom to target with your alleged “primary selling point,” yo. (even hiphop’s got love for the fab four as evidenced by wu-tang’s becoming the very first group EVER to legally sample the Beatles (!!?!)–sooooo… THAT happened.)

…anyway:

While Dergarabedian heaps praise on the marketing plan, Taymor feels the movie has benefited from a kind of benign studio neglect. “In a funny way, young people found the movie because it wasn’t marketed huge,” she said. “Young people don’t want to be dictated to about what’s the new cool thing.”

…. “We gave people the sense that they’d discovered it for themselves,” said Valerie Van Galder [the division’s president of domestic marketing].

i am sure that beyond classic rock’s sheer novelty or vintage cred, for the current crop of teenagers, its appeal likewise stems from the satisfaction in the personal discovery. this is a sense that is simply not possible to generate through mainstream teen-targeted music options. (wait… did classic rock just turn into alternative rock? wow. bizarre.)

i’ve written before about how valuable sustaining a sense of mystery can be for a brand, and it applies to the process of its initial discovery as well. whether sony was just hedging their marketing dollars on this weirdo bet of a movie, or whether they actually had the temperamental teen psyche aaaaall figured out reverse-psychology stylie when they eschewed spending money on any TV commercials, billboards, or PR, i think there’s something to be learned from across the universe’s model–accidental or not–that can be applied to a more deliberate kind of “discovery strategy”:

  1. start with something unique. you can’t really capitalize on a “discovery strategy” if the product won’t actually FEEL new or unexpected. (of course, a “discovery strategy” isn’t really the kind of thing that well-established fare needs to pursue in the first place, so it’s the unproven stuff to which this sort of option is most applicable anyway.)
  2. understand who the appropriate audience is and the communication / media channels they use that are particular to them. even if what you’re marketing is not a pop property but its message is disseminated through one-size-fits-all media, it invalidates the personal intimacy of discovery. a caveat in this case is using mass media to broadcast a message that will only really be meaningful to a particular community, but why do that when instead you can…
  3. provide the tools for people to be able to easily distribute the message themselves. a handy little “post to facebook” button helps, but so would have the option to get the embed code for the preview so that people could post the video to myspace and their blogs and wherever else that wasn’t just facebook. (nuanced forethought, or obviously tacked-on afterthought, right?)
  4. go on TRL.

and in case you’re wondering, this is NOT a “viral campaign.” the difference is between a ploy to abuse some unfortunate loophole inherent in ADD for an attention-spike, and a strategy to enable the creation of a meaningful, personally-compelling discovery that leads to a lasting (consumer) relationship.

from the LATimes:

Nicole Sacharow, 15, from Culver City, for one, ranks “Universe” among her “favorite movies ever.” She’s seen it twice and would already have notched up several more viewings were it not for scheduling conflicts with her friends.

“You go up to a group of people and say, ‘Who wants to see “Across the Universe” this weekend?’ ” Sacharow explained. “The songs are addicting. Everyone who goes to see it has the soundtrack. I listen to it every day. I hear people singing the songs around school.”

i’d say the movie has the potential to become this decade’s RENT (the war allegory standing in for the 90’s AIDS nemesis.) with wu-tang paving the way on beatle’s rights clearance, i could easily see a broadway version of across the universe in the future. but where could they find a visionary, multi-Tony award-winning director to–oh!

uh… never mind.

    



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by jenks

non-definition as a defined identity

The goal of all human activity can’t be reduced to the leaving of descendants. Once human culture was firmly in place it acquired new goals.
– Jared Diamond, The Third Chimpanzee

right as i was in the process of rereading the third chimpanzee (i had to read it in college for sociobiology, and recently realized i’d forgotten half of it), a friend of mine forwarded me this NYmagazine article, The Cuddle Puddle of Stuyvesant High School. “it’s very interesting in terms of trend ideas and stuff,” he told me. “i thought of you.”

the article follows a particular clique of kids (primarily girls) up at NYC’s stuyvesant high school, a magnet public school for some of the city’s créme de la créme teens (similar to my high school alma mater, boston latin). i read this piece in the same week as the NYTimes feature on the girls of newton north high (a suburb right outside of boston). the article was called For Girls, It’s Be Yourself, and Be Perfect, Too. it’s funny that i read these two articles in such proximity, because they actually came out within two months of each other and couldn’t be more divergent in what they present as the focus of the elite-educated, east coast, teenage girl experience.

the NYTimes says:

To spend several months in a pressure cooker like Newton North is to see what a girl can be — what any young person can be — when encouraged by committed teachers and by engaged parents who can give them wide-ranging opportunities.

It is also to see these girls struggle to navigate the conflicting messages they have been absorbing, if not from their parents then from the culture, since elementary school. The first message: Bring home A’s. Do everything. Get into a top college.

The second message: Be yourself. Have fun. Don’t work too hard.

….If you are free to be everything, you are also expected to be everything. What it comes down to, in this place and time, is that the eternal adolescent search for self is going on at the same time as the quest for the perfect résumé.

two months earlier the NYMagazine article presented the findings of its own investigation into the workings of the contemporary teen female search for self:

Alair is headed for the section of the second-floor hallway where her friends gather every day during their free tenth period for the “cuddle puddle,” as she calls it. There are girls petting girls and girls petting guys and guys petting guys. She dives into the undulating heap of backpacks and blue jeans and emerges between her two best friends, Jane and Elle, whose names have been changed at their request. They are all 16, juniors at Stuyvesant. Alair slips into Jane’s lap, and Elle reclines next to them, watching, cat-eyed. All three have hooked up with each other. All three have hooked up with boys—sometimes the same boys. But it’s not that they’re gay or bisexual, not exactly. Not always.

while the “amazing girls” of newton north (it’s what their teachers and classmates call them) talk about lives overwhelmed sometimes to the point of nervous breakdown by the amount of work all their accelerated classes and extra curriculars demand, education is put into a completely different context by the girls of stuy’s cuddle puddle: because of their school’s superior education, one of the girls says, the students are more open-minded.

just as the intense academic pressure that is the focus of the NYTimes article is barely assigned an impact in the after-school lives documented by the NYMagazine article (“Sure, they drink and smoke and party, but in a couple of years, they’ll be drinking and smoking and partying at Princeton or MIT. They had to be pretty serious students to even get into Stuyvesant, which accepts only about 3 percent of its applicants.”) sexual identity exploration is completely brushed aside in the lives of the newton north girls.

This year Esther has been trying life without a boyfriend. It was her mother’s idea. “She’d say, ‘I think it’s time for you to take a break and discover who you are,’” Esther said over lunch with Colby. “She was right. I feel better….. I never thought, ‘If I don’t have a boyfriend I’ll feel totally forlorn and lost.’ My girlfriends have consistently been more important than my boyfriends. I mean, girlfriends last longer.”

just to be clear, that’s “girlfriends” in a completely platonic sense, but the sentiment is at least the one bit of common ground between these two seemingly wholly divergent worlds. “Relationships are a bitch, dude,” says Alair, the 16-year old “punk-rock queen bee” of the NYMagazine piece. relationships also play a huge role in the process of defining one’s sexual identity, and they seem to be going out of style.

while the gauntlet of college acceptance is now more competitive than ever, i think the process of navigating sexual identity has now likewise become infinitely more complicated. and for the latter there is no standardized test prep-course.

from NYMagazine:

These teenagers don’t feel as though their sexuality has to define them, or that they have to define it, which has led some psychologists and child-development specialists to label them the “post-gay” generation. But kids like Alair and her friends are in the process of working up their own language to describe their behavior. Along with gay, straight, and bisexual, they’ll drop in new words, some of which they’ve coined themselves: polysexual, ambisexual, pansexual, pansensual, polyfide, bi-curious, bi-queer, fluid, metroflexible, heteroflexible, heterosexual with lesbian tendencies—or, as Alair puts it, “just sexual.” The terms are designed less to achieve specificity than to leave all options open.

the irony in this, of course, being that the very IDEA that “sexuality doesn’t have to define me” itself comes to define a particular identity. a particularly modern kind of identity that previous generations are ill-equipped to understand what the hell to do with.

“My mom’s like, ‘Alair, I don’t understand you. I want to be a parent to you but I have no control at all . . . As a person you’re awesome. You’re hilarious, you entertain me, you’re so cool. I would totally be your friend. But as your mother, I’m worried.’ ”

“To some it may sound like a sexual Utopia,” says the NYMagazine article. “Where labels have been banned and traditional gender roles surpassed, but it’s a complicated place to be.” it’s one thing to grow up in the suburbs, discover your personal non-status quo sexual identity, and move to some open-minded metropolitan place where you can create a community around this shared lifestyle-identity. it’s quite another to grow up in an environment where the very definition of sexual identity itself is the status quo you’re rebelling against. and though manhattan may be an island it is by no means isolated in this respect.

The Stuyvesant cuddle puddle is emblematic of the changing landscape of high-school sexuality across the country. This past September, when the National Center for Health Statistics released its first survey in which teens were questioned about their sexual behavior, 11 percent of American girls polled in the 15-to-19 demographic claimed to have had same-sex encounters—the same percentage of all women ages 15 to 44 who reported same-sex experiences, even though the teenagers have much shorter sexual histories.

….It practically takes a diagram to plot all the various hookups and connections within the cuddle puddle. Elle’s kissed Jane and Jane’s kissed Alair and Alair’s kissed Elle. And then from time to time Elle hooks up with Nathan, but really only at parties, and only when Bethany isn’t around, because Nathan really likes Bethany, who doesn’t have a thing for girls but doesn’t have a problem with girls who do, either. Alair’s hooking up with Jason (who “kind of” went out with Jane once), even though she sort of also has a thing for Hector, who Jane likes, too—though Jane thinks it’s totally boring when people date people of the same gender. Ilia has a serious girlfriend, but girls were hooking up at his last party, which was awesome. Molly has kissed Alair, and Jane’s ex-girlfriend first decided she was bi while staying at Molly’s beach house on Fire Island. Sarah sometimes kisses Elle, although she has a boyfriend—he doesn’t care if she hooks up with other girls, since she’s straight anyway. And so on.

the article asks the question, how will this teenage experimentation eventually affect the way they choose to live their adult lives?

and i’m wondering how will it affect the way marketers talk to them?

a couple of months ago there was a bit of talk going on about Levi’s “Innovative Gay Marketing Move,” where levis produced two different versions of the same ad, one for a straight male audience, and one for a gay one. while the gay version premiered exclusively on MTV’s Logo network, whose programming is aimed at the gay community, the actual “innovation” in this dual-ad strategy that everyone latched on to seems to be simply the fact that the gay community was acknowledged at all on their own terms side by side with an approach to the straight demo. (so that only took about 40 years). levis, essentially, letting everyone know that they’re hip to the differing desires of these two identities as defined by sexual orientation. congratulations.

the question now is: how do you approach an identity that is defined not by gay or straight or even bisexual, but by its shared distaste for defining its new hybridity in those binary terms at all?

    



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by jenks

babies no longer buying furniture

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teen spending, however, remains stable.

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or maybe new parents are increasingly just buying all this stuff online.

    



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