Hunting For Cool

There is a Frontline video called "Hunting For Cool" that aired on February 17 2001. This video is about what kids think is cool and what companies will do to target the kids. Kids are one of the most targeted demographics to companies because they have the money and will buy a product if they think it will make them seem cool. There is a man named Douglas Rushkoff who had a couple kids sit in a room with him and he asked them all sorts of question to find out what they wear, eat, listen to and watch.

Companies want to target young kids on things like television and other media sources because they have a lot of money to spend freely and will most likely see the advertisements. Anywhere they go there is a marketing message and teens on average see 300 discrete messages in a day and 10,000,000 by the time they are 18 years of age. 75% of teens have a television in there rooms and 1/3 have personal computers. On their computers teens spend 2 hours a day on the internet. Because there are so many channels marketers are able to specify age demographic and have demographics for one year age differences.

Trying to find out what these kids like is called hunting for cool. Marketers are trying to find out what all of the cool kids are doing or what they could be doing in hopes for their followers to follow them. 20% of the population will influence the other 80% to buy things so they influence those 20% and they will do the rest. The people who try to find these things out are called culture spies. Culture spies perfectly describes these people because they are trying to find out what is "hip" in today's culture. They walk around with cameras, do research on the internet, watch videos, and have interviews with other people, which are all things that companies cant do so they hire these "culture spies" to penetrate these boundaries. The goal for the culture spies is to find out what the trends are before they get popular because once all of the marketing companies find out about whats popular it will no longer be popular.

-Ben Sampson