Advertising and Coolness

 

          Recently in class, we watched Making Cents Out of Teens: Merchants of Cool, which is a documentary about how advertisers try to keep up with the times and how they market their products. Something that I thought was very interesting about their tactics is that advertisers send people around to find out what is considered “cool.” These people are called cool hunters. They talk to people and look at the trends they see and common threads and interest between them. The cool hunters then report back to the advertisers about what is cool. The advertisers use this information to craft their ads to appeal to young people. Specifically, they are targeting teenagers because they have a lot of excess money to spend. But the most interesting part of this is that the advertisers doing this essentially destroys the coolness of whatever cool thing they put in the ad. This is because when something is brought to the mainstream, everybody tries to do that cool thing. This makes it lose its specialness and its coolness. Then the “cool kids” move on to something else and advertisers have to figure out what that is so they can put it into their ads and ultimately inadvertently destroy them. And it continues on in a cycle forever until the cool kids find something that is completely indigestible by advertisers. This is usually something that is highly vulgar or inappropriate in some other way for the mainstream population. I think that this plays a large role in the rebellious teen stereotype. While this problem may not cause the stereotype, it definitely would exacerbate it. In their effort to find something that is cool, they stray further and further from the media and everything else that is seen as “safe” or “mainstream.” While this stereotype used to be very common and still is to an extent, it is slowly decreasing. Some of this void has been taken up by hipsters, whose whole thing is liking something before it was considered cool. They like smaller, lesser known things, like indie movies or very small bands. This is a more peaceful escape from mainstream media and culture than the rebellious teen movement was. But I find it quite ironic that in their search for cool, advertisers end up destroying cool, or taking the coolness of a thing away. Advertisers are aware that this is happening, but they do not know how to combat it. All they can do for now is keep on looking for and destroying coolness until they can find another way to do things.