Young people are growing so rapidly in consumer influence that the marketing world is still fumbling to classify and name them. Terms such as youths, young people, and youngsters sound too much like something my Grade 8 gym teacher would’ve said. More contemporary terms such as Gen X, Gen Y, Millennials, and the Echo Generation have definitions too narrow for the demographic we’re putting under the microscope in this chapter. So I’ve decided to go with “Yoots,” Joe Pesci’s approximation of “youths” in the picture My Cousin Vinny.
eople under twenty—“yoots”—are the new holy grail of marketing, and they know it. Children, tweens, teenagers, and young adults have enormous power to create, trash, and rebuild social trends and a collective spending clout that would have Captain Von Trapp thinking twice before wrapping his lips around that damned boson’s whistle.
Marketing firms, news services, and parent groups swing the statistics—many of them conflicting—but most of them pointing to the same trend: young consumers carry an astonishing amount of consumer clout:
THE SPENDING POWER OF YOOTS
A majority of American teenagers own cellphones.
In 1985, 23 percent of teens aged sixteen to nineteen owned cars, and by two decades later, that percentage had almost doubled.
“Tweens” (people eight to twelve years old) are said to represent a $335 billion market.
Kids aged four to twelve are spending tens of billions of dollars per year.
Those of us with kids can only nod knowingly when told that the marketing clout of young people isn’t limited to the money they spend themselves; it expands to include the family spending they influence. So much of this begins with a major shift in the parent-child dynamic that took place with the postwar consumer boom and the tendency of kids to quickly and naturally embrace new technology. In January 2008, Advertising Age noted that one-third of digital music players (most of them iPods) were owned by kids six to ten years old and contained on average 125 songs, 10 TV shows, and 15 movies. Today, I wouldn’t dream of buying a computer or phone or software without at least consulting my offspring, who have amassed such a vast knowledge of new products and gadgets that I suspect they’re sneaking out past curfew to attend covert consumer-tech classes. The influence of young people now goes beyond whining to parents for a specific brand of breakfast cereal (though studies show parents do buy more groceries when their kids go shopping with them). Market researchers report that a majority of parents consult their kids before making major purchase decisions, even in their choice of a new vehicle. Though estimates vary, the upper-end figures suggest that each year, young people are directly and indirectly responsible for $570 billion in purchase decisions.
The theory is that these are hand-me-down iPods: parents graduate to the newest digital players, and their teenaged kids already have their own, so Mom and Dad pass their perfectly good, old players on to their younger kids.
The first evidence of this generation shift in expertise arrived with the VCR as parents stared blankly at their new machine flashing twelve o’clock, with no idea of how to program or set it up, and had to rely on their kids’ expertise.
Whatever the number actually is, news media and advocacy groups seem firmly agreed on a few things:
• Young people are amassing enormous consumer influence.
and
• Their influence is growing. Fast.
To that let’s add the phenomenon that will be keeping us in its thrall for the rest of this chapter:
• They’re becoming increasingly immune to conventional marketing messages—even more than their parents are.
The rapid growth of the youth market, compared to that of other demographics, has made it the hottest property in marketing, but it’s not without its own Indiana Jones-style booby trap. Young people have become adept at seeing through the sales language advertisers have honed for more than a century, and they’re media savvy enough to know how the marketing machine works. What’s more, they’re turning away from traditional advertising-driven media, disappearing into the electronic version of gated communities as they hunker down in front of their computers, putting up fences that most marketers haven’t yet learned to scale.
The role of young people has undergone an amazing transformation, in a world where many can still remember a time when children were “seen and not heard.” No one imagined the attitude shift that would begin as the first radio sets appeared in living rooms of the 1920s. Early advertisers, still scouting the vast terra incognita of broadcast marketing, were still discovering that, yes, housewives would alter their work patterns to tune into daytime programming. And they soon discovered that children’s programming could occupy their offspring—but which sponsors, they wondered, might bother to underwrite programming directed at children?
This is not a biblical expression, as some believe, but is thought to have originated in the fifteenth century, when it referred specifically to young ladies.
An early entry, a CBS radio program called Let’s Pretend, began its twenty-six-year run in 1929, backed by its long-time sponsor, Cream of Wheat. Children, and later their children, would perk up at the sound of this jingle:
Cream of Wheat is so good to eat
That we have it every day.
We sing this song. It will make us strong
And it makes us shout, “Hurray!”
It’s good for growing babies
And grownups, too, to eat.
For all the family’s breakfast,
You can’t beat Cream of Wheat.
The Cream of Wheat brand was no newcomer to using verse, a mnemonic advertising form that predates radio by several decades. For example, in 1913, Cream of Wheat had run an ad in McClure’s magazine with this verse:
What do I care
for snow or sleet.
My tummy is full of Cream o’ Wheat.
Makers of breakfast cereals were among the first serious players to use radio to communicate their brand directly to kids, and Wheaties joined Cream of Wheat on the radiowaves in the 1920s. The timing of the manufacturers of this upstart new breakfast cereal was impeccable, or lucky, or both. As an “early adopter” of radio advertising, the Washburn Crosby Company launched one of the oldest-known radio jingles, performed by an ad hoc quartet, as part of a sponsored program on Minnesota radio station WCCO. It helped that the company owned the station. (Its call letters were a short form of the firm’s name at the time, though the outfit would later be rechristened “General Mills.”)
Ear·ly adopt·er (noun) Marketing jargon, usually referring to a consumer happy to embrace new products and technologies long before the masses do, and often without so much as dipping a toe in the water first.
A CRISPY, CRUNCHY STAR IS BORN
Wheaties flakes were “discovered”—for want of a better word—by a health clinician with the Washburn Crosby Company of Minneapolis, in 1911. Goes the story: he was preparing gruel, a pasty wheat cereal, when he spilled some on a hot stove. The gruel promptly cooked and turned into small, yummy wheat flakes.
He shared his discovery with Washburn’s head miller, George Cormack, who experimented with twenty-six variations of the formula until he finally created a flake that would hold together through the packaging process. In November 1924, the cereal was proudly launched as an exciting new, ready-to-eat breakfast cereal—Washburn’s Gold Medal Whole Wheat Flakes, a name changed, mercifully, to “Wheaties” after the company held an internal naming contest.
So it was that in 1926, radio listeners heard the slow, sombre, hymn-like a cappella chorus
Have you tried Wheaties?
They’re whole wheat with all of the bran.
Won’t you try Wheaties?
For wheat is the best food of man.
They’re crispy and crunchy, the whole year through.
The kiddies never tire of them and neither will you.
WASHBURN CROSBY, THE JINGLE PIONEER
Though it’s hard to prove, General Mills claims that “Have You Tried Wheaties” was the first singing commercial ever to be aired. Released on Christmas Eve 1926, it featured The Wheaties Quartet, which consisted of an undertaker, a bailiff, a printer, and a businessman, who performed the song live on the air for the next six years. Each received $6 per performance.
Before long, the Washburn Crosby Company made a fascinating discovery: whenever the jingle was sung on the air, sales climbed. Granted, today this isn’t the stuff of rocket science, but in a time when “reason why” advertising ruled—when advertisers believed they had to make a point-by-point case for their brand—the concept of selling a product simply by singing about it was an epiphany.
The Wheaties brand continued to blaze new trails in broadcast marketing in the early 1930s, when they struck a sponsorship deal with the Minneapolis Millers Baseball Club, whose games they agreed to broadcast on WCCO. The arrangement called for a Wheaties billboard over the left field fence where the product’s new ad slogan would be displayed. That is—just as soon as they had one. Enter Minneapolis ad guy Knox Reeves. According to legend, when Reeves was asked to create a Wheaties slogan, he pulled out a pad and pencil, sketched a Wheaties box, and stared at it for a moment. Then, quicker than Malcolm Gladwell can blink, he said, “Breakfast of Champions” and plunked the pencil down. From then on, Wheaties wasn’t about breakfast; it was about the emotion of victory.
It was right about here that Wheaties shifted its marketing strategy away from an adult audience and used radio to reach young people with their “Breakfast of Champions” message. The man they hired to develop the right vehicle was Frank Hummert, the raja of the radio soap. (We met him and his business partner and wife, Ann, in Chapter 3.) Hummert proposed that they take “Skippy,” a popular cartoon character, and adopt it as Wheaties’ mascot and as the hero of a kids’ radio series. All went swimmingly until a Skippy storyline—about the kidnapping of one of the hero’s pals—coincided with a real-life tragedy, the kidnapping and death of the Lindbergh baby.
Hummert went back to whatever passes in radio as a drawing board and created Jack Armstrong: The All-American Boy. In flawless harmony with the Wheaties’ brand, Jack Armstrong was a champion: he was the pride of Hudson High, who could dominate the gridiron and the diamond and the basketball court and the track—and discover lost treasure, land aircraft, and uncover international spy rings—all in time to cram for his algebra mid-term. Jim Ameche, lesser-known brother of actor Don, was the first to loan his voice to the character, who graced the airwaves from 1933 to 1951.
In 1930 Ovaltine underwrote the radio incarnation of the Harold Gray comic strip character Little Orphan Annie. During its early years, before network connections were up to snuff, the series was produced in both Chicago for the east coast and San Francisco for the west, where separate casts performed the same script. Dozens of kids’ radio programs followed, many featuring popular comic strip characters. Dick Tracy went to air in 1934, sponsored first by Sterling Products, then by Quaker Oats, who used the conspicuously un-Quakerlike tactic of appealing to kids by way of firearms:
| ANNCR: | The makers of Quaker Puffed Wheat and Quaker Puffed Rice, those two delicious nourishing cereals that are shot from guns, now bring you another thrilling Dick Tracy detective adventure … |
The subsequent ad explained that rice and wheat, respectively, were placed in special “guns” in the Quaker plant, where they were exploded to eight times their normal size.
Then, before kids had a chance to wrap their minds around a cereal shot from guns, they were given instructions:
| ANNCR: | [I]f you’re a loyal Dick Tracy fan and friend, check up on the pantry at least twice a week to make sure there’s always puffed wheat or puffed rice there. Look to see at the end of today’s program, and if there isn’t one of those famous red and blue packages in the pantry now, ask Mother to order some from the grocer’s. |
Hear that? That’s the sound of a radio announcer forming a secret cabal with a young listener—right there in the family’s living room—inciting him to lobby for a given brand of breakfast cereal. Within that speech is an implicit warning: if you don’t check that pantry twice a week for Quaker cereals, well, you’re not a loyal Dick Tracy fan. Radio recruited kids by the thousands as operatives, charged with ensuring that Mother didn’t make the catastrophic error of showing disloyalty to Dick Tracy by picking up one of those—ugh—other cereals.
Loyalties forged among young listeners would pay dividends long after the commercials faded. And research would later affirm what those early marketers might only have suspected: children as young as two can develop brand loyalties, while children as young as three recognize brand logos. Advertisers also learned to change tack when speaking to kids, not just in their language and tone, but in their sales strategy. Rather than citing the benefits that might best appeal to mothers—economy and nutritional value, for instance—they painted on the much broader canvas of the young imagination. A cereal might be shot from guns or come ready-t o-serve, with sugar already on it.
So boasted Andy “Jingles” Devine, co-star of The Adventures of Wild Bill Hickok, when promoting Kellogg’s Sugar Corn Pops. He was also careful to add that you can eat ’em out of a bowl for breakfast or out of the box as a snack.
Many copywriters in those early radio days learned to embrace the phrase “Ask Mother,” but Skelly Oil was even craftier. Sponsoring the Captain Midnight kids’ serial, it once prompted young listeners to lobby Dad to buy Mom one of their new Skelgas ranges as a Christmas present. As a bonus, Skelly Oil would include a free fifty-two-piece dinnerware set (in the attractive Barcelona pattern). That, the announcer counselled young listeners, “can be your present to Mother.”
Many, from Buck Rogers to Little Orphan Annie, offered club memberships with a card and often a trinket. The Orphan Annie decoder pin, which allowed club members to decipher coded messages read during the program, worked so well for Ovaltine that when they shifted their sponsorship in 1940 to the more martially inclined Captain Midnight, they took their decoder premium with them, adapting it to their new hero. Many “premiums” drove direct sales by requiring some proof of purchase, such as cereal box tops, Popsicle wrappers, or the inner seal from a jar of peanut butter. Not only did radio premiums ensure immediate sales and cultivate lasting brand relationships with young consumers, they also put mothers in the habit of looking for a given brand—a habit that may well have continued beyond the life of the radio promotion.
Or a reasonable facsimile. Canadian law usually forbids companies to require that anyone buy their product in order to enter a contest, so advertisers had to accept a “reasonable facsimile” in place of an actual box top or coupon. While it didn’t spur sales, sellers had to love the fact that kids would spend hours lovingly drawing their logos.
Premium (noun) Typically a trinket or discount offered as an enticement to buy a product. Your first brush with a premium might have been the toy you dug out of a cereal box when you were a kid.
Following the Second World War, months after thousands of servicemen and women returned, young families beat a path to their local maternity wards. The postwar economic boom gave families confidence to expand. New highway systems, and an invigorated workforce pushed city workers into new-fangled suburbs. For a decade and a half, the “war” generation would produce the offspring—the now-ubiquitous baby boomers—who would drive marketing and culture for most of the next half century.
Raised in prosperity few of their parents knew and their grandparents never even dreamed of, the baby boomers grew up with the strong winds of consumerism gathering speed around them. They were the first born into the television age, which had overtaken popular culture by the mid-fifties, and marketers brought lessons gleaned from radio to the new medium. They realized that Saturday mornings, a traditional “dead spot” among older viewers, could be filled with programming for kids.
In December 1947 NBC launched Puppet Playhouse, featuring “Buffalo” Bob Smith. Within days the name was changed to Howdy Doody. Among his cast of characters was Tim Tremble, played by a young comedic actor, Don Knotts, and Clarabell the Clown, played by former U.S. Marine reservist Bob Keeshan. In October 1955, Keeshan created a TV institution, Captain Kangaroo, for CBS. Among early TV offerings for Canadian kids were Burns Chuckwagon from the Stampede Corral, produced not in Calgary but way out yonder in Vancouver. From Ottawa came Let’s Go to the Museum with Robert MacNeil, later the co-anchor of The MacNeil-Lehrer Report. In the early 1960s, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation would import a Pennsylvanian Baptist-minister-turned-kids’-TV-creator by the name of Fred Rogers, to develop its children’s programming. He’d bring with him one Ernie Coombs, who would remain in Canada and later earn fame as Mister Dressup. Not all kids’ shows were sponsored, though all attracted young viewers to the new ad-driven medium.
Bandstand. It was a Philadelphia-based show, but when ABC picked it up in 1957 and renamed it American Bandstand, they made a household name of former disc jockey Richard Wagstaff “Dick” Clark, who at twenty-eight, would soon be crowned “America’s oldest teenager.” On the north side of the border, Canadian teens were swept up in the same trend with Cross-Canada Hit Parade, first hosted by actor-broadcaster Austin Willis. Teenaged boomers were soon surrounded by rock and roll, and by the late 1950s, radio stations formatted with “the devil’s music” spread like crown vetch across the urban, and now suburban, landscape. A few years later, an invention called the “transistor radio” made this new music port able. No more were teenagers obliged to sneak into the living room to turn on the family hi-fi and fill the house with their raucous, boogie-woogie claptrap. Now they could take their raucous, boogie-woogie claptrap with them, beyond the protective ears of Mom and Dad. The car culture of the late fifties and sixties, captured so perfectly in the movie American Graffiti, also propagated rock and roll as it pounded out of car radios. Needless to say, advertisers were quick to leap onto the scene, to take advantage of such fertile ground. And at the same time, a growth in part-time jobs gave young people the consumer clout to create the first serious blip on marketers’ radar.
Willis was the original choice to play CIA agent Felix Leiter in Goldfinger, but he was relegated to the role of Leiter’s sidekick, Simmons, and was thus deprived of the privilege of uttering the classic screen line “Ten’ll get you one, it’s either a drink or a dame.” That honour went to fellow Canuck Cec Linder. (Both Linder and Willis graced my company’s studios many times.) Willis, Linder, and Lois Maxwell—who played Miss Moneypenny—made for a sizable Canadian contingent in that famous Bond film.
To be fair, a generation earlier, jazz and blues were distinguished by the “devil’s music” moniker. But by the fifties, the title was tacked onto anything north of Lawrence Welk.
Imagine. A device that fit in the palm of your hand, was filled with music, and came with earphones. Sound familiar? Cough. iPod. Cough.
Youth-oriented media—especially broadcast—developed its own language and tone, or so it desperately hoped, because they were targeting an audience that was not only lucrative but also savvy. Hip cats with bread made the scene at the flicks or at some cookin’ bash or just went ape (which I’m tellin’ ya, man, frosted the heat). Ad copywriters, stranded with their hoods up and rads steaming on a lonely roadside outside Squaresville, struggled—often in vain—to learn the dialect and probe the inner psyche of the teenaged mind. But they gave it a good shot, resulting in copy like this:
Loosely, and rather formally, translated, this means: In-the-know persons with disposable income revelled at the cinema or attended an invigorating party or engaged in agitated behaviour (which exasperated the law enforcement officers).
TWO TEENS SIT IN A MALT SHOP, VIBRANT WITH OTHER TEENS, AND WITH ROCK AND ROLL GUITAR MUSIC PLAYING IN A JUKEBOX.
| TEEN GIRL: | We’ve been going steady six weeks today. |
| TEEN GUY: | They’ve been the best six weeks of my life. |
| TEEN GIRL: | Really? |
| TEEN GUY: | No foolin.’ Goin’ steady with you, and making the team … and gosh … I’ve even licked my own dandruff problem. |
| TEEN GIRL: | I know. |
| TEEN GUY: | [ponders a moment, then:] That crazy Head & Shoulders really works! |
As early TV broadcasters scrambled for programming that would unite advertisers with young viewers, many found themselves rooting around in the attics of their archrivals in the film industry, dusting off theatrical cartoons to be packaged as programming for young viewers. In the earliest days, these audiences were fed a steady diet of Woody Woodpecker, Harvey Toons, Popeye the Sailor, and the ever-wonderful (pardon my bias) Warner Bros. cartoons. The market was ripe for ran original, relatively low-cost, animated TV show that would unite advertisers with a fast-growing, young audience.
Warner Bros. cartoons were a tutorial in comedic timing and the use of sound effects, both of which informed subsequent generations of radio writers and directors.
Enter (stage left) ex-MGM animators William Hanna and Joseph Barbera, who in 1957 formed a company to create animated programming specifically for kids. Unlike theatrical animators, such as those who created feature films for Walt Disney, Hanna-Barbera developed production methods that cut costs through more static images and repetitive backgrounds. TV cartoons would never be the same, especially after 1960, when this pair unleashed a show that was to become a pop culture institution.
It was a prime-time animated series, loosely based on Jackie Gleason’s The Honeymooners and created for an adult audience. First developed as The Flagstones, the program’s title evolved to The Gladstones before its debut on September 30, 1960, as The Flintstones. The kid portion of the viewership might not have mattered had the sponsor not been Winston cigarettes, who provided ads like the one where Fred and Barney sneak away from their yardwork to light a couple of darts behind the garage. The unusual marriage of Winston and the Flintstones lasted about three years: when Wilma became pregnant with Pebbles, Winston butted out gracefully, making way for the more wholesome folks at Welch’s (the ones who make the grape juice). But by that time, the Flintstones-tobacco combo had raised questions about the imaginary curtain that separated “kids’ TV” from grownup programming.
FRED, WILMA, AND THE DOUBLE BED
An irresistible piece of folklore has it that Fred and Wilma Flintstone were the first prime-time TV couple to be shown sharing a bed. (TV couples before them, it was said, had been relegated to twin beds.) However, the great urban legend busters at Snopes.com insist that the first-time bed-sharing honour went to one of the earliest TV sitcoms, Mary Kay and Johnny, in 1947. No less fun is Snopes’ revelation that in The Brady Bunch, six kids shared a bathroom without a toilet anywhere in sight. But we digress.
By the 1960s, as so many baby boomers reached their teens, they took a hard look at the world and didn’t like what they saw. White males dominated a multigendered, multiracial world. Remnants of Vietnamese villages smouldered with the sickly scent of napalm. TV viewers watched police dogs attack civil rights protesters, and icons of change were assassinated. The heavyweight champion of the world abandoned his “slave name,” Cassius Clay, to become Muhammad Ali and risked jail rather than serve in Asia, telling reporters “No VietCong ever called me a nigger.”
Emboldened by their sheer numbers and by their economic clout, boomers set about using their power. Advertisers, those friendly people who once enticed them with peanut butter and pimple creams, became “the man”: corporate predators, hucksters. Had they simply been jaded, that would have been hard enough for marketers, but boomers did them one better: they became media literate, and media studies classes began to spring up in high schools. Young people were gaining a sense of how marketing worked and easily saw through the old-school sales devices of slogans, rote, and the “call to action.” Advertisers were like the magician whose audience knows all his tricks and now struggled to draw even polite applause.
On September 26, 1964, the week The Warren Report was published, concluding that a lone gunman had slain President Kennedy, and as the third session of Vatican II reshaped modern theology, Linus the Lionhearted premiered on CBS television. It was a high-end cartoon series featuring an embarrassment of top voice talent, including Sheldon Leonard, Ruth Buzzi, Jonathan Winters, Anne Meara, Jerry Stiller, and Jesse White (the original Maytag repairman). The problem? Several of its star characters, including Linus and Sugar Bear, were created to pitch specific Post Cereals—Crispy Critters and Sugar Crisp, respectively.
I once directed Stiller in a cereal commercial. He was playing the voice of an animated honey bee. Take after take, it wasn’t funny. Then I asked him to yell the entire script in the style of his Seinfeld character, Frank Costanza, which he did, and we all fell on the floor laughing. Stiller, hearing the laughter, asked with genuine wonder, “Why does that always work?”
Sensing that advertisers were stepping out of bounds, parents set about constructing moats around their children, and governments, reading the wind direction, developed laws and broadcast regulations limiting the relationships between marketers and children. In time several European countries and the province of Quebec banned any kind of broadcast advertising directed at children. Elsewhere, children’s broadcasters faced a litany of guidelines and regulations, some of them prohibiting sponsors’ products from being depicted in kids’ programs. At the same time violent moments were excised from vintage cartoons.
The timing couldn’t have been worse for the creators of Linus! After two seasons, America’s Federal Communications Commission (FCC) pooped their party, passing a new regulation that prohibited advertising icons from becoming stars in children’s programs, and likewise, stars of children’s programs pitching products in ads. The regulation wasn’t without grey areas: consider the great baritone Thurl Ravenscroft, who was a staple of both ad voiceovers (he gave voice to Tony the Tiger) and kids programming (he sang “You’re a Mean One, Mr. Grinch” in the immortal Chuck Jones cartoon How the Grinch Stole Christmas). The regulation restricted characters from appearing in both ads and children’s programming, but did not extend to actors and voices.
TIGHTER REGS FOR KIDS’ ADS
As those children of the sixties became parents themselves, they were already wary of marketers offering sales pitches too thinly disguised as children’s entertainment. And today the firewall of regulations separating children and advertisers extends beyond kids’ shows. In Canada, advertisements for beer, wine, and liquor are forbidden to use celebrity endorsers who might be considered appealing to kids. That included anyone—read: anyone—who was on kids’ radar. In the spring of 2003, when hockey commentator Don Cherry appeared in ads for a major beer brand, Canadian regulators ruled that his appeal to children constituted selling beer to underage viewers and ordered the ads pulled.
Not to be constricted by broadcast regulations, some advertisers found new ways to reach young audiences, and in the spring of 1990, a new face appeared in the classrooms of four hundred American schools. It was Channel One, a daily TV news program, complete with two minutes of paid ads. Schools signing up received the hardware necessary to broadcast a daily twelve-minute current events program. The cost? Students would be subjected to four thirty-second ads tucked within each broadcast, and schools signed a contract promising to show students the broadcast virtually every school day. The shows were, as you might imagine, upbeat and fast paced. Among the energetic reporters featured onscreen was a very young Anderson Cooper, later bound for stardom on CNN.
Despite the objection of scores of educational organizations, and an outright ban in some jurisdictions, Channel One survived, expanding in time to more than twelve thousand schools and an audience of eight million students. By 1999, such high-powered brands as Pepsi, Nabisco, Procter & Gamble, and the U.S. Armed Forces were paying $200,000 for a thirty-second spot. But that same year, a U.S. Senate oversight committee, responding to growing public unease with ad-driven TV content in American classrooms, called Channel One brass onto the carpet and gave them the Capitol Hill equivalent of a wedgie, then sent them home to resume their programming. In Canada a similar venture, the Youth News Network, tried—and failed—to infiltrate classrooms.
There’s a strong sense of farce in pretending schools are an advertising-free bubble: logos and sponsored messages have found their way into cafeterias and onto sports scoreboards for years. A fast-food pizza chain sold slices in my daughter’s public school, and parents combined that with a fundraising component. In the 1990s Coke and Pepsi engaged in a fierce war for exclusive contracts within schools and universities, some worth tens of millions of dollars. This generated angst among parents and students, many of whom didn’t take kindly to having themselves “sold” to major brands. Many educational institutions would, in time, ban pop machines altogether.
Ads have long been a fixture in high school yearbooks, but now they’re seeping into school hallways and into, on, and on top of school buses. Time, Newsweek, and the New York Times have published special editions for classrooms, complete with advertising. A California outfit called ZapMe! provides schools with free computers and Internet, but the service comes with commercials targeting students.
In maybe the most brazen example, Tom Farber, a calculus teacher at a suburban San Diego school, was told by his school board that they were cutting supplies budgets by nearly a third. That posed a problem for Farber, because at three cents a page, his test sheets alone would cost more than $500 per year, and his annual copying budget was just $316. So he started selling ads on his test papers. As he said in an interview on CBC Radio, “Tough times call for tough actions.” A local newspaper printed a story about Farber’s plans, and when he came home after a three-day vacation, he discovered seventy-five email requests for ad space. His semester final is sold out. Most of the ads are for local businesses, and they play into the medium. For example, one dentist is running an ad that says, “Brace yourself for a great semester.” The “ads on exams” idea is getting very mixed reactions around the country, as you can imagine, with many people taking exception to the notion of businesses paying to get access to kids. Farber first asked his students if they would be offended by the idea, and the answer was no. Parents are also supporting him. As Farber says, “We’re expected to do more with less.” He wants to help the kids, and advertisers are more than happy to help him.
What does all this teach young people? Quite a bit. Each generation is becoming even more media savvy than the one that came before it, and some take to rebellion.—
Hence the wave of “culture jammers”—crusaders out to disrupt the flow of marketing messages in order to make a statement of their own. (That name was adopted by Vancouver’s not-for-profit Media Foundation, which publishes Adbusters magazine.)
Having taken its lumps, the marketing world is coming back with more creative and less cynical ways of connecting with students. Early in 2008 Dave Droga, of the marketing firm Droga5, launched a campaign dubbed The Million, which involved both the New York City Department of Education and Verizon. As Droga put it, the campaign reinvented the cellphone as a motivational tool. Under the Million campaign, each student received a phone free of charge, and then, by improving school attendance, participation, homework, and grades, they would be rewarded with airtime for phone calls, texting, and music downloads. And like all cellphones, the Million would not be allowed in the classroom. Campaigns like this may or may not be the most acceptable way of inviting marketers into a classroom, but it’s a healthy sign that “old-school” advertising philosophies may be banished to the principal’s office.
An eye-catching ad appeared on the sides of New York buses in 2004, for the hip hop clothing designer Akademiks. It showed an attractive woman wearing a sweater, panties, and a playful expression. She was kneeling on a book-strewn floor, looking over her shoulder, with her caboose facing the camera. On her panties was emblazoned the name “Akademiks.” Beside it, the headline “Read Books. Get Brain.”
To most readers older than thirty, it probably came across as a slightly saucy, street-smart ad, promoting literacy. But that was before the New York Daily News broke the story: “Get Brain” was street slang for oral sex. This vernacular nugget had escaped the scrutiny of the New York City Transit Authority, which promptly pulled the ads. I would be astonished if the agency behind the ad didn’t fully understand the meaning of the term. They may have reasoned that, sure, it was a contentious line. But since only young people—their target audience—were likely to understand the double meaning, what was the harm? Media outfits in six other major U.S. cities were similarly taken in.
Similar campaigns are cropping up elsewhere as advertisers salt their copy with naughty slang terms detected only by a select group of young consumers. Those who get the joke feel like insiders, members of a club. They snicker as their parents did a generation earlier, when they persuaded the high school secretary to page “Bob Loblaw” or “Hugh Jorgan” to the office. Ever wonder why Abercrombie & Fitch blasts such loud music in their stores? It isn’t to attract kids but to repel parents. It was a strategic decision; parents roaming around the stores killed the cool factor for younger shoppers.
The year before the Akademiks ad, Reebok ran a bitingly funny Super Bowl commercial—Terry Tate: Office Linebacker. The fictitious Tate, in dress pants and a football jersey, patrolled the office, slamming, tackling, and trash talking terrified employees foolish enough to violate office protocol, such as finishing a pot of coffee without making a fresh one or not including a cover sheet on a TPS report. These moments were so much fun that few seemed to notice the company name: Felcher & Sons. “Felcher” is a slang term referring to one who engages in “felching”: an especially unsavoury sex act. A harmless mistake? There are, after all, eleven “Felchers” in the New York City phone directory. On the other hand, ads by a brand that big, on a stage as grand as the Super Bowl, make it hard to imagine that someone didn’t know the slang meaning of the name.
“F-C-U-K” apparel made quite the splash—for awhile, at least. Ostensibly it stood for “French Connection United Kingdom” when it first appeared in 1997, but the word played on the human brain’s tendency to see words as patterns, rather than as groups of individual letters, filling in blanks and rearranging them as familiar terms. This phenomenon was likely in play when a potential juror was kicked out of a courtroom in Wales for wearing a F-C-U-K shirt. Meanwhile, French Connection got a lot of publicity from a lawsuit launched by a group called Conservative Future U-K.
Spinning tidily in his grave is ad pioneer David Ogilvy, who once said of print ads: “Never write an advertisement which you wouldn’t want your own family to read.” The rules have changed in the age of persuasion. So have consumers, and advertising writers.
I have a friend whose twenty-year-old son settles arguments by smiling, leaning in, and declaring: “Yeah? Well I’m picking your retirement home.” This is just evidence of the funny thing that happened as the torch was passed from boomers to their children: empowerment turned into entitlement. When they were younger, kids of this generation had bedroom walls adorned with sports awards and medals received just for showing up. Their kindergarten “graduations” were marked by commencement ceremonies, complete with gowns and mortarboard caps. They were raised by adult cheerleaders chanting, “You’re special,” and they believed it. Their schools nurtured them, encouraged them, and then sold them to advertisers. They learned. They watched as the benevolent corporate culture of their grandparents’ time—the one-job-for-life variety—devolved into a leaner, meaner, “What have you done for me lately?” headspace. They remembered. Today it isn’t unusual for the latest crop of brilliant, tech-savvy, entry-level employees to dictate terms to potential employers. Major corporations are actually turning to a new breed of consultant to help them manage young employees who dress as they please, arrive when they please, and leave when it suits them, and who would think nothing of seeking work across the street if everything isn’t to their liking. And despite their unprecedented spending power, the newest crop of consumers is virtually unpersuadable. This group isn’t likely to bolt to the supermarket because a cute, animated doughboy asked them to.
THE “FART” INDEX
A useful measure of the edginess of advertising today is the popular use of “fart” sounds. I’m not fond of the word fart, and no one would have dared use flatulence in a radio ad when I started in the business thirty years go. But today, as the tone of advertising shifts to appeal to yoots, “fart” gags are common: agencies bring me “fart” scripts to produce, and “fart” spots are winning international advertising awards. In the 1980s you wouldn’t have found such sounds in a radio sound effects library, but now, if you searched the word fart in my studio’s sound effects database, you’d find more than four hundred entries.
This new generation is creating a crisis in ad-driven media. The attention of young people, once devoted to TV and radio, is now being spread thinner and thinner as they embrace downloaded music, texting, and instant messaging, and online communities such as Facebook and MySpace. To advertisers, they’re becoming available by appointment only, and they aren’t making appointments.
The blunt realities of marketing to young people are causing vast changes in the language and tone of advertising. As their attention shifts from mass media to smaller, online social networks, they’re sharing information and opinions about products and brands and fashions. For the first time ever, consumers are moving much faster than brands.
TWITTER: FEEDBACK IN REAL TIME
My first experience with Twitter was while giving a speech to a tourism group. As I spoke, people were very engaged in my talk, but they were also typing furiously on their BlackBerrys. When I got back to the office, I went onto Twitter and saw that people had been sending tweets about aspects of my speech to each other while I was giving the speech. They were commenting on what I was saying, in real time, with others in the room and with people who were elsewhere. Later, when I mentioned this to the organizer of the event, he told me that some speakers keep Twitter open on their laptops while giving their speeches, so they can keep an eye on live feedback, allowing them to respond to comments in real time. The crowds are now way ahead of the parade.
No generation has done more than this one to cause such rapid changes to advertising. Every day the tone of ads becomes edgier, less formal, and more experimental as marketers struggle for effective ways to reach lucrative young consumers. And over the past two decades, the mean age of advertising writers, designers, and executives has plummeted as agencies hire youth to speak to youth.