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  • 7/2/2025
Douglas Rushkoff examines the techniques businesses and marketers use to cater to the teenage consumer demographic, as well as the resulting cultural ramifications.

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00:00they want to be cool they are impressionable and they have the cash they are corporate america's
00:15150 billion dollar dream teenagers have a lot of disposable income they want to go spend their money
00:22and you know we're more than happy to make product that they want to go spend it on
00:25mtv madison avenue and the dream makers of hollywood have targeted our teenagers they look at the teen
00:32market as part of this massive empire that they're colonizing teens are like africa they're the most
00:38studied generation in history if you don't understand and recognize what they're thinking
00:44what they're feeling you're going to lose you're absolutely going to lose but what does this
00:48relentless focus on the teenager do to the culture they're going to do whatever they think works
00:55the fastest and with the most people which means that they will drag standards down and to the
01:01teenagers themselves i have to look good for people if i need to look good tonight author and media
01:08critic douglas rushkoff takes a journey through the complex world of buying and selling cool
01:24stupid
01:31okay so i'm going to take attendance here christopher
01:39Okay.
01:40The dog?
01:41Right there.
01:42Okay.
01:43Adam?
01:44Okay.
01:45You guys can all have a seat right over here.
01:59Has anybody ever done a focus group before?
02:02Do you remember what you talked about?
02:04Back to school supplies.
02:06On a summer afternoon in a downtown New York loft,
02:10corporate America is on a very serious mission.
02:13You know, it's all going to be sort of like what you guys think.
02:15You guys are sort of the experts today,
02:17and it's going to really be just you guys telling me your opinion.
02:20These five boys are here to be questioned
02:23about what they wear, what they eat, what they listen to and watch.
02:27For $125 each, they're expected to answer.
02:31Tell me some of the things that are really hot right now,
02:35popular trends, things that you sort of see everywhere.
02:39What's like going on?
02:40What's hot right now?
02:42Just shout them out.
02:44Okay, so they're no more responsive than most teenagers.
02:48But that's not going to stop this market researcher,
02:51because the information he's looking for is worth an awful lot of money.
02:55At 32 million strong, this is the largest generation of teenagers ever,
03:02even larger than their baby boomer parents.
03:05Last year, teens spent more than $100 billion themselves
03:10and pushed their parents to spend another $50 billion on top of that.
03:14They have more money and more say over how they'll spend it than ever before.
03:19Teens run today's economy.
03:22There's an innate feeling for moms and dads to please the teen,
03:26to keep the teen happy, to keep the teen home.
03:28And I think you can pretty much take that to the bank.
03:34They're given a lot of what we call guilt money.
03:36Here's the credit card.
03:37Why don't you go online and buy something,
03:39because I can't spend time with you.
03:41I'm Douglas Rushkoff, and tonight we'll tour through a landscape
03:46that has both attracted and repelled me during the decade I've been studying it.
03:50It's the world in which our teenagers are growing up,
03:53a world made of marketing.
04:01For today's teens, a walk in the street may as well be a stroll through the mall.
04:06Anywhere they rest their eyes, they'll be exposed to a marketing message.
04:11A typical American teenager will process over 3,000 discreet advertisements in a single day,
04:18and 10 million by the time they are 18.
04:21Kids are also consuming massive quantities of entertainment media.
04:25Seventy-five percent of teens have a television in their room.
04:29A third have their own personal computer,
04:31where they spend an average of two hours a day online.
04:34I think one of the great things about this information age is with so many channels,
04:38you can say, my business is 12 to 15, or my business is 21 to 24.
04:42As a result, you have the most marketed to group of teens and young adults ever in the history of the world.
04:49It's a blizzard of brands, all competing for the same kids.
04:53To win teens' loyalty, marketers believe, they have to speak their language the best.
04:58So they study them carefully, as an anthropologist would an exotic native culture.
05:04If you don't understand and recognize what they're thinking, what they're feeling,
05:09and then be able to take that in and come up with a really precise message that you're trying to reach these kids with,
05:19in their terms, you're going to lose. You're absolutely going to lose.
05:24Is there anybody in your group of friends in particular that is always really following the trends?
05:29No, really.
05:30No? So it's just sort of all of you together kind of keep each other in check?
05:34Yeah.
05:35Okay. Cool.
05:37What makes this market so frustrating is that they don't operate the same way as the rest of us.
05:42They're a stubborn demographic, unresponsive to brands and traditional marketing messages.
05:48But there is one thing they do respond to.
05:51Cool. Only cool keeps changing.
05:54So how do you map it? Pin it down?
05:57Like, if I'm moving up, stop me when we get to, like, two years ago.
05:59What is cool anyway?
06:01Like, right here? Okay.
06:03The search for this elusive prize has its own name, cool hunting.
06:08Cool hunting is structured around, really, a search for a certain kind of personality
06:12and a certain kind of player in a given social network.
06:16For years and years on Madison Avenue, if you knew where the money was
06:19and where the power was and where the big houses were, then you knew what was going to happen next.
06:23And cool hunting was all about a kind of revolution that sets that earlier paradigm aside
06:28and says, in fact, it has to do with the influence held by those who have the respect and admiration
06:34and trust of their friends.
06:37Many companies don't trust themselves to do this kind of research.
06:42So they hire experts who can find these cool kids and speak their language.
06:46We look for kids who are ahead of the pack because they're going to influence what all the other kids do.
06:51We look for the 20%, the trendsetters, that are going to influence the other 80%.
06:56Dee Dee Gordon is a sought-after cool hunter.
07:00Just 30 years old, she commands high fees as a consultant to some of the largest corporations in America
07:06and has been the subject of a New Yorker profile.
07:09How good is she? I think she's as good as anyone is at this game.
07:13And it's something, it's a difficult thing to quantify, of course.
07:16It's not a science.
07:18It's really a question, ultimately, of how much do you trust the person who's doing the interpretation
07:23and how good are their instincts.
07:25And I think, in both cases, she's at the top of the field.
07:29Three years ago, Gordon and her partner, Sharon Lee, left the small advertising agency where they worked
07:36to start their own business, Look Look.
07:38All the photos are really busy, so somebody has to shoot a skateboarder in the air or a cyclist in the air.
07:45Gordon and Lee have put together a team of what they call correspondents.
07:49All young, all former cool kids themselves.
07:52The Slipknot story came in and our writer did a really good job.
07:56They're culture spies, who penetrate the regions of the teen landscape where corporations aren't welcome.
08:02Can I take you a picture for a street culture website I work for?
08:05Go ahead.
08:06I gotta get your piercings.
08:07Can I get your tattoo?
08:09Yeah, sure.
08:10A correspondent is a person who has been trained by us to be able to find a certain kind of kid,
08:17a kid that we call a trendsetter or an early adopter.
08:20This is a kid who's very forward in their thinking, who looks outside their own backyard for inspiration,
08:25who is a leader within their own group.
08:28These kids are really difficult to find.
08:35So what this correspondent does is they go out and they, like, find and identify these trendsetting kids.
08:41They interview them.
08:43They get them interested in what we do.
08:47They send all that stuff in.
08:48We look at it.
08:49We compile it.
08:50We look for trends or themes that are happening through all the information,
08:54and that's the stuff that we put on our website.
08:57For a subscription fee of $20,000 each, companies are granted access to the Look Look website,
09:03a Rosetta Stone of teen culture.
09:06If companies can get in on a trend or subculture while it is still underground,
09:11they can be the first ones to bring it to market.
09:14And that's when the mass consumer picks up on it and runs with it and then eventually kills it.
09:20And that's the paradox of cool hunting.
09:22It kills what it finds.
09:24As soon as marketers discover cool, it stops being cool.
09:28The faster you pick up on these trends and blow them out and show them to everybody and reveal them to corporate America,
09:35the more you force the kind of person who starts them and spreads them to move on and find the next.
09:40So you simply, um, there's no kind of solution to this.
09:44You can't ever solve the puzzle permanently.
09:46By discovering cool, you force cool to move on to the next thing.
09:52For those who crossed out Madonna, why did you cross out Madonna?
09:54She's old.
09:55She's old?
09:56This creates a problem for marketers.
09:59Kids begin to see them as the enemy.
10:02So what do marketers do?
10:04Market to kids without seeming to do so.
10:07Become cool themselves, as Sprite did a few years ago.
10:11I like the way you make me laugh.
10:14In the early 90s, Sprite was an also-ran brand in the competitive soft drink category.
10:21Their focus groups with teenagers were designed to find out what was wrong.
10:25What we found by talking to teens is that they had seen so much advertising that they were on overload
10:31and became very cynical about, um, that traditional approach to advertising.
10:36Hi, I'm Brad Hill, professional basketball player for the Detroit Pistons.
10:40Then they launched this ad campaign aimed at teens, which pokes fun at marketing itself.
10:46Because it's the only drink with that cool, crisp, refreshing taste that satisfies even my manliest thirst.
10:54There was really no one in the market at the time that was saying,
10:59Discount it all.
11:00Don't believe it.
11:01It's all BS.
11:03And we know that you know that.
11:06And you're smarter than everyone else.
11:08So, it put them in a position to feel like we understood them.
11:13So that they were feeding back to us, you know, Sprite understands me.
11:16And Sprite is one, you know, it's really one of us.
11:20It worked for a while.
11:22But soon, Sprite's own focus groups revealed that kids were getting wise to this anti-marketing marketing campaign.
11:28They had Grant Hill telling you not to listen to some celebrity telling you to drink a beverage.
11:32Right.
11:33Well, that's what you're doing.
11:34You're listening to Grant Hill telling you to drink Sprite.
11:35Right.
11:36I don't know how much they probably paid all those stars to come on and say,
11:39Don't listen to what a star says.
11:44So Sprite crossed an entirely new threshold, into the innermost sanctum of teen culture,
11:49where they cloaked themselves in genuine cool.
11:52Hip-hop for us became the sort of vehicle or the lens for us to get to teens and talk to them in a credible way.
12:01And the way we did that was to develop relationships with artists.
12:06They all of a sudden put their arm around that kid that was drinking Sprite.
12:09And so we understand you. We recognize you.
12:11We want to be part of your life and not just please drink our product.
12:16They almost weren't even selling the product.
12:18They were selling the fact that they understood the culture.
12:21They were selling a lifestyle.
12:22And I think that's why Sprite's been so successful and one of the leaders in terms of reaching youth.
12:28Former record executives John Cohn and Rob Stone run a New York marketing firm called Cornerstone.
12:35Their specialty is under the radar marketing.
12:38For instance, Cornerstone hires kids to log into chat rooms and poses just another fan of one of their clients.
12:47And that's what the focus group is about.
12:50They also recruit incoming freshmen to throw parties where they pass out promotional material to their classmates.
12:55If we're, you know, maybe we've got a bunch of promo Buster Rhyme CDs and that would be great to give out at the hip-hop concert.
13:03Cornerstone helped Sprite tap a network of radio DJs and hip-hop artists to smuggle their message into the world of kids.
13:12The days of developing cute campaigns or whatever, they don't work anymore.
13:18You have to really get involved in what their culture is.
13:21You have to understand where they're coming from.
13:23You have to think how they think.
13:25It worked.
13:27Thanks to the teens who buy it, Sprite is now the fastest growing soft drink in the world.
13:33Sprite invited us to a kickoff party for their new website, Sprite.com.
13:39Scores of kids were paid to show up and revel in the sounds and styles of urban authenticity.
13:48While we were there, some of the biggest acts in rap music appeared on stage under the company logo.
13:54Here it was, the ultimate marriage of a corporation and a culture.
13:59Sprite and hip-hop had become one and the same, each carrying the other to its audience.
14:05Sprite has really become an icon. It's not just associated with hip-hop. It's really a part of it.
14:12As much as baggy jeans and sneakers, Sprite has become an icon in hip-hop culture.
14:19Is it nostalgic to think that when we were young it was any different?
14:24That the thing we called youth culture wasn't something that was just being sold to us.
14:29It was something that came from us. An act of expression, not just of consumption.
14:34Has that boundary been completely erased?
14:37Today, five enormous companies are responsible for selling nearly all of youth culture.
14:44These are the true merchants of cool.
14:47Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. Disney. Viacom. Universal Vivendi. And AOL Time Warner.
14:58The entertainment companies, which are a handful of massive conglomerates that own four of the five music companies that sell 90% of the music in the United States.
15:07Those same companies also own all the film studios, all the major TV networks, all the TV stations pretty much in the ten largest markets.
15:15They own all or part of every single commercial cable channel.
15:19They look at the teen market as part of this massive empire that they're colonizing.
15:24You should look at it like the British Empire or the French Empire in the 19th century.
15:28Teens are like Africa. You know, that's this range that they're going to take over.
15:32And their weaponry are films, music, books, CDs, internet access, clothing, amusement parks, sports teams.
15:41That's all this weaponry they have to make money off of this market.
15:47Of the five media giants, the coolest conglomerate on the block is Viacom.
15:53And Viacom's crown jewel, there on the second floor, is MTV, which last year earned the company a billion dollars in profits.
16:02MTV launched 20 years ago with a simple but brilliantly commercial concept.
16:09Use record companies' promotional music videos as creative programming.
16:13Since then, the cable channel has grown into a youth marketing empire.
16:20But its basic business model has remained the same.
16:23Everything in MTV is a commercial. That's all that MTV is.
16:27Sometimes it's an explicit advertisement paid for by a company to sell a product.
16:31Sometimes it's going to be a video for a music company there to sell music.
16:36Sometimes it's going to be the set that's filled with trendy clothes and stuff there to sell a look that will include products on that set.
16:43Sometimes it will be a show about an upcoming movie paid for by the studio, though you don't know it,
16:48to hype a movie that's coming out from Hollywood.
16:50But everything's an infomercial. There is no non-commercial part of MTV.
16:54This strategy keeps MTV's airwaves filled with cheap and easy content.
16:59Nelly's over there doing this thing. Let's check in with him. All right, let's see what Nelly's doing over there.
17:03Take MTV's daily program, Direct Effects. See anything familiar?
17:08That's the Sprite.com party we showed you earlier.
17:11We didn't know it at the time, but the cameras swirling over our heads belong to MTV.
17:17The Sprite.com launch party is crazy. And right now, I got two of the hottest in hip-hop for you right now.
17:25So let's connect the dots. Sprite rents out the Roseland Ballroom and pays kids 50 bucks a pop to fill it up and look cool.
17:33The rap artists who perform for this paid audience get a plug on MTV's show, Direct Effects, for which Sprite is a sponsor.
17:41MTV gobbles up the cheap programming, promoting the music of the record companies who advertise on their channel. Everybody's happy.
17:49But while this cross-promotional free-for-all may maximize returns for MTV and Viacom, it also violates the first rule of cool. Don't let your marketing show.
18:00MTV learned this lesson the hard way a few years ago when their ratings began to slip.
18:06There was a perception that MTV had lost its way a bit with the young consumer. Ratings were down somewhat. Some of the trend studies said that we were less cool, less creative than before.
18:15So MTV had the humility to realize that cool was not their birthright. That it belongs to kids and kids keep changing. If they wanted to stay cool, they'd have to change right along with them.
18:28MTV felt like we needed to get a closer connection to the audience. Where we said, if we know more about them, know more about their lives, know more about who they are, what they want, what they don't want,
18:42We can make a better MTV as a better connection with the audience if we talk to them and listen to them a lot more.
18:49We immersed ourselves in research about the fall of 97 and have been able to turn that around to where now our rankings when it comes to creative or original or funky or anything you would care about, musically relevant, have went way, way up and our ratings are the highest in their history.
19:02The new MTV is all about learning what kids really want, then delivering it to them. Their signature show, Total Request Live, plays music videos by popular demand.
19:17And every afternoon, mobs of kids crowd into Times Square to gaze up at the windows of the TRL studio to see whichever mega band might be making a guest appearance.
19:29Today it's a TRL favorite, rap metal artist Slim Biscuit, whose videos are frequently voted into the top ten. More on them later.
19:37It's really the first time MTV was able to give over the control of a show to the viewers and say, you know what, you tell us what you want to hear, what you want to see, what the videos are.
19:46And they've been in control of it since it went on the air. So I think that's one of the reasons that it's really important to us and it's really important to the audience because there's that real bond.
19:54To ensure that bond stays strong, MTV must understand where teen culture is moving. Market research is the mantra and its guru is Todd Cunningham.
20:05Some of this music is dead on for exactly what kind of stuff that our audience is going to want. The research efforts at MTV are certainly legendary.
20:15There's been a kind of feverish addiction to research and understanding young people and that's been embraced from the very top down.
20:24MTV let us in on their techniques. Todd Cunningham told us to meet him at an address in the small town of Island, New Jersey.
20:33A short time after we arrived, a black town car pulled up. Cunningham, a former advertising industry executive, emerged with a member of his staff.
20:45This little field trip, Cunningham had explained, is called an ethnography study in which MTV market researchers visit a typical fan in his home.
20:55Today, MTV is meeting John, an ordinary kid in every respect, who is carefully screened to make sure he is just that.
21:08It is hoped that by studying John in his natural habitat, MTV might gain insight into one of the most valuable segments of their viewing demographic, the teenage male.
21:19The teenage male.
21:21I'd love to see, like, clothes. Like, what's your favorite thing you have? What's your favorite shirt?
21:26I don't know. It's probably one of my sweaters. They're in my drawers, if you want to see them.
21:30Okay. Well, we can look at that in a minute. What else? What else? What are the kind of things you wear usually? Like, what's...
21:34I wear a lot of, like, khaki pants. Yeah. Mm-hmm. And, uh, oh, I have some suits for church or whatever.
21:42We shut the door in their bedrooms and talk to them about issues that they feel like are really important to them.
21:47We talk with them about, um, what it's like to date today, what it's like dealing with their parents,
21:54what things stress them out the most, um, what things are, like, really on the hearts and minds of them and their peers.
22:00I'm just curious about, like, things with, like, you want to have a seat if you want?
22:04Just, like, with your girlfriend and stuff like that.
22:07And, I mean, this is, we always just ask these kind of questions about, are you, like, how long have you guys been dating?
22:14Since, uh, June 1st.
22:17It's captured on video. So we have a camera crew, sound and light crew there.
22:22We cut that videotape together, put it to music, edit it in an MTV-style way.
22:27We then take that around and show it to, uh, various department meetings, share with them the insights that we've learned.
22:34So what happens to all this careful research?
22:37All the hours and dollars that MTV spends learning about who our kids really are?
22:42When all the tape is reviewed, what portrait of the American teenage male emerges?
22:48How did the wire go? Oh, God!
22:51Hot juice on my leg!
22:53His critics call him the Mook. That's right. M-O-O-K. Mook.
22:59And you can find him almost any hour of the day or night, somewhere on MTV.
23:04He's not real. He's a character. Crude, loud, obnoxious and in your face.
23:10He's Tom Green of the Tom Green Show.
23:15There's a sewage plant in my anus. And it stinks.
23:19And he's the daredevils on Jackass, who indulge in dignity-defying feats like poo diving.
23:25Right, Don. And this is poo diving.
23:29Oh, bro!
23:33He's those frat boys and their whipped cream bikini girlfriends on MTV's constantly recurring spring break specials.
23:40Hey, Terrence! What brand of pants am I wearing?
23:42Let me see!
23:44He has migrated to MTV's sister network, Comedy Central, where he's the cartoon cutouts of South Park.
23:51Or the lads on The Man Show.
23:53The juggies look nice, don't they?
23:55Yeah!
23:57Eat those beans!
23:59The MOOC is perhaps Viacom's most bankable creation.
24:03Once programmers discovered his knack with teenage boys, they replicated him across the length and breadth of their empire.
24:10Oh, my goodness! Grabbing my ass!
24:13Grabbing my ass!
24:14Take Howard Stern, perhaps the original and still king of all MOOCs.
24:19Look how Viacom leverages him across their properties.
24:22He is syndicated on 50 of Viacom's Infinity radio stations.
24:26His weekly TV show is broadcast on Viacom's CBS.
24:30His number one best-selling autobiography was published by Viacom's Simon & Schuster, then released as a major motion picture by Viacom's Paramount Pictures, grossing $40 million domestically and millions more on videos sold at Viacom's Blockbuster Video.
24:47Go ahead, tell me more about me.
24:49All right.
24:50So does the whole teenage experience come down to this?
24:53Are our boys MOOCs?
24:55No.
24:56Is John a MOOC?
24:57I don't think so.
24:58Maybe all that research isn't really about understanding John as a person.
25:03It's about understanding John as a customer.
25:05I mean, they don't call it human research or people research.
25:09They call it market research.
25:11The MTV machine does listen very carefully to children.
25:16When corporate revenues depend on being ahead of the curve, you have to listen.
25:20You have to know exactly what they want and exactly what they're thinking so that you can give them what you want them to have.
25:27Now, that's an important distinction.
25:29The MTV machine doesn't listen to the young so it can make the young happier.
25:35It doesn't listen to the young so it can come up with, you know, startling new kinds of music, for example.
25:41The MTV machine tunes in so it can figure out how to pitch what Viacom has to sell.
25:46Crotch, crotch, crotch.
25:48There is no MOOC in nature.
25:50He is a creation designed to capitalize on the testosterone-driven madness of adolescents.
25:56He grabs them below the belt and then reaches for their wallets.
25:59What, my crotch?
26:01What MTV is struggling with is what's going on with all our cultural industries.
26:05We have fewer and fewer owners but more and more choices.
26:08So they have to desperately find ways to keep people looking for gimmicks.
26:12And they don't have a huge time frame to establish an identity.
26:15With the remote control, you know, your shelf life of chances to keep someone to get them to stay there is very short.
26:21You can't develop a character over six weeks.
26:23They're going to be gone after two minutes.
26:25So it puts pressure on commercial culture providers like MTV to try to find sort of things that their research shows will click right away,
26:34recognizable things, and play on those.
26:37It's funny to think that the most advanced form of marketing today comes in the form of a 300-pound body slam.
26:44Professional wrestling is the most popular form of entertainment among teenage boys in America.
26:53When I was a kid, wrestling was an amusing little outpost of the culture.
27:00Today, wrestling is sheer spectacle, a magnificently honed lure for the teenage male channel surfer.
27:09The wrestlers themselves have a word for it. Pop.
27:18Pop means when that crowd pops, when they react.
27:21Wow!
27:22It's like a shock reaction, you know.
27:23Something that, you know, they didn't really expect it.
27:25So you may get that big surprise out of them, you know.
27:28Just like when you catch somebody coming around the corner and you jump out and they go, whoa!
27:32And where there's pop, there's money.
27:35That's why wrestling has been propagated across the entire spectrum of teen media.
27:44It's broadcast 15 hours a week on five different networks and is seen by 15 million people.
27:51Wrestling's violence doesn't scare me. Its ubiquity does.
27:55It is huge with our audience at sort of program levels that I could have never imagined.
28:01It is the hottest thing going among males 18 to 24 and in fact among teen boys.
28:06And so we felt like while we don't want that to be the defining element of our business, it was okay to be in the game.
28:11It was simply too big to ignore.
28:13That's what it was.
28:14When you got a few gigantic transnational corporations, each one loaded down with debt, competing madly for as much shelf space and brain space as they can take,
28:27they're going to do whatever they think works the fastest and with the most people, which means that they will drag standards down.
28:37And girls get dragged down there right along with boys.
28:42The media machine has spit out a second caricature.
28:46Perhaps we can call this stereotype the midriff.
28:49The midriff is no more true to life than the mooc.
28:52If he is arrested in adolescence, she is prematurely adult.
28:57If he doesn't care what people think of him, she is consumed by appearances.
29:02If his thing is crudeness, hers is sex.
29:06The midriff is really just a collection of the same old sexual cliches, but repackaged as a new kind of female empowerment.
29:14I am midriff, hear me roar.
29:16I am a sexual object, but I'm proud of it.
29:23Wait.
29:24Wait.
29:25Wait, wait.
29:26The midriff archetype is undoubtedly teenage megastar Britney Spears, whose latest album, Oops I Did It Again, has sold over 8 million copies.
29:36She hit the scene at 16 with Baby one more time, as a naughty Catholic schoolgirl bursting out of her uniform.
29:48When it came time for a spread in Rolling Stone, a 17-year-old self-professed virgin Britney struck the classic nymphette pose.
29:56And at the Video Music Awards last year, when Britney finally and famously came out of her clothes, she wasn't just pleasing eager young boys.
30:09She was delivering a powerful missive to girls.
30:12Your body is your best asset.
30:14Flaunt your sexuality, even if you don't understand it.
30:17And that's the message that matters most, because Britney's most loyal fans are teenage girls.
30:25I'm not that innocent.
30:29I think I did it.
30:31Oh, can I use that?
30:32Sure.
30:33If you believe, I'm more than just friends.
30:38We met Barbara and her friends at the New York Hilton, where they were preparing for the opportunity to step into the roles of midriffs themselves.
30:46I want to be a model, I want to be an actor.
30:49I want people to notice me and just be like, wow, she is pretty.
30:57I have to look good for people.
30:59I need to look good.
31:01Like, if I don't look good for people, I'll be really upset and it'll, like, ruin my day.
31:05So whenever I go out with friends, like, even just over to their house, I need to look good.
31:12Barbara and hundreds of other girls have come here to the International Model and Talent Association's annual convention.
31:20These girls have paid up to 4,000 bucks a pop for the chance to be paraded before hundreds of agents and talent scouts on the lookout for new blood.
31:32There have always been starry-eyed girls like this, but what's new is their sophistication.
31:38They've learned how a midriff should talk, move, and sell herself.
31:42Hello, my number is 7996.
31:45Fur to the loom?
31:47Bet you thought they were just for men.
31:49Well, now, there's new fur to the loom feminine style.
31:53Because girls know a good thing when they see one.
32:01Now it's time for 13-year-old Barbara to prove she has what it takes.
32:06Very good headshot.
32:09Barbara, what do you feel that your age range is?
32:12Well, I suppose that I look 17.
32:15What do you think it is?
32:17I am originally 13.
32:23I think I can range to 16 or 17.
32:28You are 13?
32:29Yeah.
32:30You're 13 years old?
32:31Yeah.
32:32What do you want to really do?
32:34What are you interested in?
32:35I would like to become successful.
32:38Good job.
32:39I want to land a contract with someone or get an agent.
32:44Let's say that you go to this convention and, like, nothing happens and no interest, then what?
32:50For some reason, I know that if I keep trying, I might get somewhere.
32:55Yeah.
32:56It was so nice to meet you.
32:57Thanks, Barbara.
32:58Good luck.
32:59Thank you very much.
33:00Barbara is just one of hundreds in this season's crop.
33:03It's a bounty for Hollywood talent agents who have more vacancies for new midriffs every day.
33:09Jeff Maroney has discovered some of the hottest teen stars in the business.
33:15Perhaps his biggest discovery was an unknown teenager named Jessica Beale.
33:19She was my client for five years and I found her here.
33:24She was on stage.
33:25She was 12 years old.
33:26Most people here weren't interested in her.
33:28She didn't, I don't think, really win any awards.
33:30And she was 12 years old and she was, like, way too tall for her age.
33:35And she was singing the lullaby of Broadway and, I think, doing fan kicks or something like that.
33:39And I just went, oh, my gosh, there's a star.
33:42Jessica Beale's first big part was on a fledgling television network devoted to the teenager, the WB.
33:49She played a minister's daughter on the wholesome teen drama Seventh Heaven.
33:54Seventh Heaven was part of the WB's newly devised formula, radical by the standards of teen television.
34:00Keep it clean.
34:02Everyone else was going the edgy route, so maybe we ought to go completely different.
34:07And there was about a year period where we went family friendly.
34:10And I think our slogan was, where America's families can watch television together.
34:15You have done so well, regaining your balance, getting back on track with your diet and exercise.
34:20I'm very proud of you.
34:22That was a novel approach at the time because, except for maybe the wonderful world of Disney,
34:26the families could not watch television together.
34:28So, you know, programming and marketing met and we thought that's going to be our angle.
34:34But the WB's family friendly shows had to compete against programming like this.
34:39The eye grabbing sex scenes of Beverly Hills 90210 and other risque teen dramas.
34:45Let's take off all our clothes.
34:47By its third season, the WB made a course change.
34:51Their new trajectory, Dawson's Creek, a show about a group of sex-obsessed high school friends in an idyllic Cape Cod town.
35:04On Dawson's first episode, one of its lead characters, 14-year-old Pacey, begins a sexual affair with his teacher.
35:12I'm sorry.
35:13It had attractive teens and it spoke to especially the female audience.
35:17But, at the same time, the Newsweeks and the Time magazines were writing about this rather risque show
35:22where a 14-year-old boy was having a romance with his teacher.
35:25You needed that plot line to really give it a bang.
35:28To give it a bang.
35:29So, uh, Jen, you a virgin?
35:31That's mature.
35:32Well, cause Dawson is a virgin and two virgins really makes for a clumsy first encounter, don't you think?
35:36In bringing teen sexual content to what had always been network TV's 8 o'clock family hour,
35:42Dawson's Creek and the WB made the headlines.
35:45However reluctantly, they had raised the sexual stakes even further.
35:50What would teens come to expect from TV now?
35:53Who would top Dawson's?
35:55MTV, that's who, by launching a new nighttime soap unambiguously entitled, Undressed.
36:02Dispensing with plot almost completely, its quick cut, channel surf resistant vignettes draw their characters so thinly they nearly disappear.
36:15Come here.
36:16It's sex TV's answer to wrestling, stringing together explosions of pop to keep its teen audience hooked.
36:23I'll give you something you've been obsessing about ever since our parents got married.
36:28Meanwhile, at the Cineplex, amped up efforts like Cruel Intentions were bringing unprecedented sexual sophistication to teen movies.
36:37One of the biggest teen hits of 1999, Cruel Intentions is the story of two spoiled step-siblings.
36:43She promises to sleep with him if he will sexually humiliate her rival.
36:48You can put it anywhere.
36:50Right here, the audience will be freaking out.
36:55Neil Moritz, the producer of Cruel Intentions, is one of the most successful teen impresarios in Hollywood.
37:02I mean, I definitely want to push the envelope with my movies because, to me, if you're making the same thing that everybody else is making, then you don't have much chance of getting people to come to your movies.
37:12And for me, I love making movies, and the only way I'm going to be able to keep making movies is by making movies that do business.
37:19A movie like I Have Cruel Intentions, where we go off and make it for $12 million, we do $40 million here, we do $60 million overseas, there's $100 million in the box office, plus all the ancillary markets, whether it be videocassette or cable or all these other markets, you know, there's tremendous streams of revenue coming in.
37:41Maritz's films have come under intense scrutiny for their sex and violence.
37:49One was even included in a government investigation because it was test marketed to 11 and 12 year olds.
37:56Still, he makes no apologies about going for the jugular.
37:59I think what you can't do is play down to teenagers, play down to the young people.
38:03No teenager is going to be satisfied with a PG-13 rated horror film, okay?
38:08They want to see the blood and guts. That's what they want to do.
38:11They want to see the slasher element of those films.
38:13And you can't do that the way they want to see it and get a PG-13 rating.
38:18But even those with the best of intentions get caught in the downward spiral of sex and violence.
38:25We noticed a kind of schizophrenia on the set of Dawson's Creek.
38:29At times, the show feels like the Waltons injected with a dose of Beverly Hills 90210.
38:35Two of its main characters are staunch virgins into their senior year of high school.
38:40But as if to keep the show cool, everyone around them is either having sex or talking about it incessantly.
38:47What do you think kids talk about? What do you think teenagers talk about?
38:54Teenagers talk about sex. Teenagers are consumed with sex.
38:58It is my personal opinion that teenagers should not be having sex.
39:05But they are confronted with it in terms of advertising.
39:10And they see it on television, in primetime shows.
39:14And in fact, in daytime shows.
39:17We have really taken sex responsibly. I feel that the WB has.
39:22And tried to portray ramifications of it. Why and how and when and where to say no.
39:29Dawson's writers and producers are aware that this is treacherous terrain.
39:34Here they are in a production meeting getting a lesson in accountability from a team of teen sex experts called The Media Project.
39:41Give me a good comeback line if a guy says, wearing a condom doesn't feel good.
39:46Oh, come on. Your writer is here.
39:52I got one. I got one. Neither does herpes.
39:5728-year-old Greg Berlanti is executive producer of Dawson's Creek.
40:02Why not lean into the fact that these kind of topics are being discussed?
40:08Why not be aware of that? And through that awareness, help kids to redefine
40:14and help people to redefine how they deal with that information.
40:18As opposed to trying to put another finger in the dam when it's gonna bust.
40:23The makers of teen TV argue that they're only reflecting the real world.
40:28Sex is a part of teens' lives, so it better be in their media too.
40:32Media is just a mirror after all. Or is it?
40:35It seemed everyone wanted to show off their bum last year.
40:41Take the annual migration of college and high school kids to spring break.
40:46For the past 15 years, MTV has packaged spring break into a staged television performance
40:52and then repackaged it through the year on show after show.
40:56Hop on and ride him around.
41:01Kids are invited to participate in sexual contests on stage
41:04or are followed by MTV cameras through their week of debauchery.
41:08Sure, some kids have always acted wild, but never have these antics been so celebrated on TV.
41:21So of course kids take it as a cue.
41:24Like here on the strip in Panama Beach, Florida, where high schoolers carry on in public,
41:30as if they were on some MTV sound stage.
41:33Who is mirroring whom?
41:37Real life and TV life have begun to blur.
41:40Is the media really reflecting the world of kids?
41:43Or is it the other way around?
41:45The answer is increasingly hard to make out.
41:52I'll never forget the moment that 13-year-old Barbara and her friends
41:56spotted our crew during a party between their auditions.
41:59They appeared to be dancing for us.
42:02For our camera.
42:03As if to sell back to us, the media, what we had sold to them.
42:12And that's when it hit me.
42:13It's a giant feedback loop.
42:15The media watches kids and then sells them an image of themselves.
42:19Then kids watch those images and aspire to be that mooc or midriff in the TV set.
42:24And the media is there watching them do that in order to craft new images for them and so on.
42:35Is there any way to escape the feedback loop?
42:38These kids believe they have.
42:40Downtown Detroit on Halloween night.
42:43Back for Joel Walls!
42:44A few thousand mostly white young men have gathered to hear a concert by their favorite hometown band,
42:51Insane Clown Posse.
42:53ICP helped found a musical genre called rap metal or rage rock,
42:58which has created a stir across the country for its shock lyrics and ridicule of women and gays.
43:04Yeah!
43:05That's right, motherfucker! Psychopathic bitch!
43:10Who's going to titty-fucking?
43:12We's going to titty-fucking!
43:14Who's going to titty-hucking?
43:15We's going to titty-hucking!
43:17Who's going to titty-hucking?
43:18We's going to titty-hucking!
43:20Tell the motherfucker titty-hucking!
43:22Right!
43:24Subcultures like this are increasingly rare in America.
43:26A true underground where kids feel spurned by mainstream culture and like it.
43:31A lot of people seem to sense anger coming off Juggalos,
43:35because there's a lot of middle finger stuff.
43:37I mean, who's the middle finger to?
43:39The middle finger is to everybody who doesn't understand what we're doing.
43:42It's to the world.
43:43To the mainstream.
43:44People who don't understand.
43:46People like these people who drive by honking their horns,
43:48drive by laughing at us.
43:50We don't care.
43:51And that's who the middle finger's in the fuck user for.
43:53Fuck, I mean, to hell with society, you know?
43:55I mean, we worry about society and what they think.
43:57They control what goes on in our bedroom,
43:59you know, what we dress like, what our hair color is.
44:02Why let it control it here?
44:03This is where we have fun.
44:04Rock music has always channeled rebellion, but where it used to be directed against parents, teachers, or the government, today it is directed against slick commercialism itself, against MTV.
44:20These fans feel loyalty to this band and this music because they experience it as their own.
44:25It hasn't been processed by corporations, digested into popular culture, and sold back to them at the mall.
44:30Everybody that likes our music feels a super connection, that's why all those juggalos here, they feel so connected to it because it's exclusively theirs.
44:45See, when something's on the radio, it's for everybody. You know what I mean? It's everybody's song.
44:48Oh, this is my song. That ain't your song. It's on the radio. It's everybody's song. But to listen to ICP, you feel like you're the only one that knows about it.
44:58Man, fuck that bitch!
45:14These are the extremes to which teens are willing to go to ensure the authenticity of their own scene.
45:20It's the front line of teen cultural resistance. Become so crude, so intolerable, and break so many rules that you become indigestible.
45:36Rage Rock is a double dog dare to the mainstream marketing machine. Just try to market this.
45:43And the thing is, that's exactly what they've done.
45:47Consider the engineered rise of Limp Bizkit. Remember them?
45:52It turns out that the nastiest expressions of youth culture are mana to an industry ravenous for anything authentic to sell.
46:01Biscuit is a rage rock band that leaves critics cold, but ignites fans with incendiary lyrics.
46:08America first got to know them at Woodstock 99, Rage Rock's coming out party, as covered by MTV.
46:14It's just one of those days!
46:18The heat burned on, and conditions grew more intolerable.
46:22And for some angry concertgoers, songs like Limp Bizkit's Break Stuff became a mantra.
46:26Time to reach deep down inside.
46:27Take all that negative energy.
46:28And let that shit out of your system.
46:29I'm like a twin song. I'll screw your ass for a while.
46:30And then my day keeps going this way, I just might break your face tonight. Give me some drink.
46:34How does a band like them become superstars? Follow this well-tested recipe.
46:55Always on the lookout for the rawest of raw material, Jimmy Iveen, the enormously successful head of Interscope Records, finds a controversial band and packages them for the mainstream, all the while claiming he's just responding to demand.
47:10There's no way to stop a movement in popular culture. There's just no way to stop it. It's going to happen with or without you. There's absolutely no way to stop that train.
47:25But when an Oregon radio station shied away from the band's crass lyrics, Interscope paid them to play one of Bizkit's songs 50 times.
47:35Then Interscope funded Bizkit's first video, which was premiered on MTV's nod to democracy, Total Request Live.
47:43I mean, I guess you could say Total Request Live is democratic in the way that, you know, this year's election was democratic.
47:49The candidates, the field of candidates is very small. And there are organizations behind them, not unlike the Democratic and Republican parties, who are deciding which candidates get promoted.
48:02So, in other words, you can't just be, you know, Joe Fabulous, who's releasing your little indie record and get on Total Request Live.
48:11Having declared them worthy of a slot on TRL, MTV now also had a stake in making Limp Bizkit stars. The network put the band on their Spring Break special.
48:26When Spring Break aired, you could see a sales change the following week. And that's the kind of reaction that a killer performance at Spring Break gives.
48:35One part authentic rage, two parts marketing, sprinkle with cash, and place in a preheated oven called Woodstock 99.
48:46The night after Bizkit's performance, the festival erupted in flames.
48:52The band's goading of the crowd was blamed, perhaps unfairly, for the mayhem which ensued.
48:58By the time the smoke had cleared, four young women reported being raped.
49:02But the band had made the big time.
49:06Bizkit's lead singer became a senior vice president at Interscope Records.
49:10And the band's relationship with MTV had become so cozy that they put a picture of executive Dave Cerulnik in their album liner notes.
49:18And made casual drop-ins at their old stomping grounds, TRL.
49:23I just happened to be in Times Square. TRL was going on. I was like, whoa, what time is it?
49:26I was using my little two-way that day, and I got it right before the show started.
49:31Two-way'd Carson. He said, come on up.
49:33So when it came time to release a new album, Bizkit naturally turned to their friends at TRL to help sell it.
49:40And sell it did, faster than any rock album in history.
49:44This is kind of an important moment, you guys being on TRL. At some point today, you know, it's weird to say millions of kids will go out and buy this record.
49:52And thus a band is made. Of course, it's impossible to know what would have happened to Limp Bizkit and Rage Rock were MTV and Interscope Records not behind them.
50:03Hey, what's up? We're Limp Bizkit, and you're watching TRL if you didn't notice already.
50:07Perhaps they would have made it to the top on their own merits. But that's just the point. No one can ever know, once MTV and Interscope Records have placed their bets.
50:16The success of Limp Bizkit and Rage Rock was all but preordained.
50:20The cool hunt ends here, with Teen Rebellion itself becoming just another product.
50:29Often, there's a kind of official and systematic rebelliousness that's reflected in media products pitched at kids.
50:40It's part of the official rock video world view. It's part of the official advertising world view. Your parents are creeps, teachers are nerds and idiots, authority figures are laughable.
50:52Nobody can really understand kids except the corporate sponsor. That huge authority has, interestingly enough, emerged as the sort of tacit superhero of consumer culture. That's the coolest entity of all.
51:09So is there anywhere the commercial machine won't go?
51:18Is it leaving any room for kids to create a culture of their own?
51:23Do they even have anything that's theirs, alone?
51:33All eyes are on our kids. They know they're being watched. But what or whom can they look to themselves?
51:39And what if they turn and fight? The battle itself is sponsored, packaged and sold right back to them.
51:52Oh, and by the way, those rebels in clown makeup from Detroit?
52:01They've signed with a major label, produced some slick music videos, even got themselves on World Championship Wrestling.
52:10And lo and behold, their latest album hit number 20 on the charts.
52:14Welcome to the Machine.
52:15Hey, headbutt's over!
52:28Explore more of the symbiotic relationship between the media and today's teens on Frontline's website.
52:35You'll find more on a day in the life of cool hunters.
52:38The extended interviews.
52:40A closer look at the five media giants and their clout with teens.
52:45Some reactions from teens to our program.
52:47A quiz.
52:48Streaming video.
52:50And for teachers, a guide to get your students engaged in this subject.
52:54Then join the discussion.
52:56See what others thought about the program.
52:58And add your own comments at pbs.org.
53:02Or send us an email at frontline at pbs.org.
53:05Or write to this address.
53:16Next time on Frontline.
53:18A road raid shootout.
53:21Yell, I'll cap you, mother.
53:23A cocaine heist.
53:25A bank robbery.
53:27L.A. Crimes committed by L.A. Cops.
53:30We have Brooks who are allowed to become cops.
53:40LAPD Blues.
53:42Next time on Frontline.
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