Notes on frontline.

Frontline – The merchants of cool – Notes.

Largest generation ever. With the biggest disposable income. Stubborn. Cool hunters will target the 20% or so who are the trend setters, the people who will influence the rest, the other 80%. They will research those 20% to decide what is cool. “As soon as media discovers cool it stops being cool”. Teens got annoyed with the amount of advertising they were seeing, and began to hate the obvious advertisement. So brands like sprite began to “anti-advertise”, advertising but not being so obvious, but they caught on to it. MTV is a channel full of advertising. For MTV to stay cool they will need to change with the kids, because the kids decide what it cool. And cool will always change. Shows on MTV that plays the most wanted music videos give the audience got to choose what was played. This helped them stay cool, because the show played EXACTLY what the teenagers thought was cool at that time and it would always change. Professional wrestling was the most watched among teenage boys. “Pop” is like a shock and where there is “pop” there is money. WB had aimed to be a channel where families could watch TV together, because other than Disney, they couldn’t do that. But they had to compete with shows more “raunchy” and after about a year they brought in Dawson’s creek, which is about a group of teens and sex. A film was created and listed as aimed at 11-12 year olds, where it was clearly not. So it was investigated by the government. But the director of the film makes no apology, because he knows that no teenager wants to sit down and watch a PG13 movie, so in attempt to be “cool” he falsely advertised it because he knew what teenagers wanted. Media watches kids and sells them an image of themselves; the kids then watch this and aspire to be them.