Journal #14: "Merchants of Cool"

This documentary features the process and techniques behind viral marketing to teenagers. This documentary inspects how “cool” is researched and distributed to its market. The idea of having a business dedicated entirely to figuring out the current trends and taking pictures of people on the street in order to document what’s popular and marketable seemed so crazy to me. It almost seemed fake and over the top, but that just goes to show that the claim of this video is correct. Culture among teens is constantly changing and that was why these people were so adamant on finding what the current trend is. These days, I bet it is easier for market researchers to do their job, because rather than going out in the streets and taking pictures of strangers, they can just go on Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat, or YouTube to find what’s literally “#trending”.

These platforms, themselves, are the present-time’s equivalence to MTV in the early 2000s. It is a hotspot for culture, trends, and almost, unknowingly, advertisements. The only difference is, these days it is much easier for an individual to break through and make a name for themselves. That 13 year old girl in the video who is very determined to get signed by an agent, would probably be making YouTube videos if she were a teen in the present time. Although taste has definitely evolved since the release of this documentary, the process of marketing to teens is exactly the same. Large name companies sponsor celebrities, youtubers, and even instagrammers with a large following in exchange for advertisement on their social media platforms. We, teens, see our idols using them or recommending their products and we tell ourselves that we definitely need to buy that too. As the years went by and these platforms grew, so did MTV. I never knew that MTV used to stream mainly music videos. Granted, I never really watched MTV, but from what I knew and what popular culture has presented, MTV features reality TV shows, like “Dance Moms” or “Teen Mom”. They’re still on air and still widely popular, but now they have completely changed in order to suit the audience they are trying to reach.

It is interesting to see the behind the scenes of things that we see in our everyday lives and play into our tastes and likes. In the video, they ask if the marketing is mirroring teenage culture or are teenagers mirroring the culture that is presented to them and from that the question of authenticity arises. At this point in time, society has cultivated so many cultures and subcultures that we have probably become a healthy blend of both of them. I also realized that they made a 2014 and 2016 remake of this documentary, which I am planning on watching. It’ll be interesting to see how things have changed.