One of the more comical aspects of the new media world is the requirement that the people who run media companies (mostly middle-aged men) somehow understand the desires of the digital trendsetters of tomorrow (mostly teenage girls). As parents know from time immemorial, this is pretty much an impossibility - but what’s a media exec to do?
It’s common these days to hear businessmen talk about their children’s habits; a focus group of one, or two, or three may not be very scientific but, hey, it’s better than total ignorance. At the Web 2.0 conference last year there was actually a panel of teenagers, moderated by a Wall Street analyst, talking about the merits of MySpace versus Facebook and the like. It was interesting, sort of, though ultimately not very enlightening.
Then of course there are the traditional opinion surveys, like the one released last week by the Los Angeles Times and Bloomberg News. The LA Times’ lengthy and prominently-featured story on the results was headlined “No Big Demand for Small Screen”, because most of the kids (ages 12-24) didn’t seem enthused about watching movies and television shows on iPods and mobile phones. Or at least they were less enthused than those middle-aged media executives seem to expect.
When you drill down on the results, there is actually less there than meets the eye. Watching video on hand-helds wasn’t popular mainly because the quality is lousy and the price is high - factors which will probably go away in due course and which don’t really provide much insight into the minds of teens (grown-ups would almost certainly say something very similar). And the kids offer various comments that fall into a category that they themselves might label “no-duh”.
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“Why would I want to look at a video clip on my cellphone?” offered one 21-year-old. “I’d rather make phone calls on it.”
The most striking - and frightening - thing to me about the survey is that the leading news source for teenagers, by far, is the local television news. In the U.S., at least, local TV is the bottom of the news food chain, the medium you can count on for gory crimes, bogus health advice and promotional spots for the station’s TV shows disguised as news stories (Up Next: An interview with a Survivor contestant!). The survey also shows a tremendous amount of TV consumption in general, and a very high (and probably under-reported) level of TV influence on behavior.
A media exec looking at these results isn’t going to learn very much about what teens really want, and it underscores the fundamental problem of much market research: people can’t really anticipate what they might or might not do with products or services that don’t yet exist. The great success stories of the new media world almost always come out of the blue, and are often created by the people for whom they are intended; the founder of Facebook was a Harvard student with good insight into what might be interesting and useful for Harvard students.
This is not much help for those middle-aged media exec, I realize; they can’t just give up and go home. But I’d like to suggest something subversive: media people should focus on creating what they think are great products, not what they think some inscrutable group of teens might think are great products.
For one thing, my personal suspicion is that what’s appealing to kids is less different than we think from what’s appealing to adults. I-Pod, MySpace, YouTube, Google - they all resonate across generations. When newspapers create dumbed-down “youth” editions, or tech companies offer cheaper-and-simpler versions of products with kids in mind, the kids smell the condescension and stay away. Despite what we parents might sometimes think, they are not a different species.
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This strategy might also help media companies connect with their long-lost ethical obligation to consider not just what kids might like, but what might actually be good for them. Reasonable people can disagree on whether violent video games and sex-filled TV shows and Internet porn are corrupting the souls of our youth, but at this point it can hardly be argued that watching more than 4 hours of television a day (as a quarter of those surveyed in the LA Times poll do) is a healthy way to spend the high school years.
I have no more insight then the next guy into the mind of the teenage girl, and fortunately I’m not in the business of marketing to children. But I do think there is a universal principle here: products that reflect the passion of the creator, rather than the results of a survey, are more likely to be interesting and successful - and they’ll probably be a little more socially responsible too.
Jonathan Weber is the founder and editor in chief of NewWest.Net, a new type of regional news and information service focused on the Rocky Mountain West in the United States. He was previously the co-founder and editor in chief of the Industry Standard