on 14 July 2009Morgan Stanley, the global financial services people, have released a report on ‘How Teenagers Consume Media’. Cue fusty attempt by middle-aged guys in suits to get wit da yout, but no: this one’s written by a genuine teenager. Not a Chloë Sevigny-type scenester (yes, I still think of Chloë Sevigny as a teenager, because I’m old) but a 15-year-old summer intern, Matthew Robson. (It’s not clear how something written by a summer intern gets published on the 10th of July, before interns would normally start, but maybe he was an intern last year, or ‘intern’ in this case means ‘doing a fortnight’s work experience’, or whatever.)
Matthew’s report is refreshingly lacking in references, and seems to be based mostly on his own observations of his mates, plus some guessing. This probably makes it like a zillion times more accurate than anything Morgan Stanley would normally publish. Much of the content, as MS rather tactlessly admit, ‘will not necessarily surprise’, but there are some interesting points. Not least: teenagers are skint.
Contrary to popular assumption, they don’t have every game console and a hot PC and a nicer phone than you and me, because they can’t afford those things. (Bear in mind this is the social set of a guy who got himself a summer job with Morgan Stanley – sink estate it ain’t.) They don’t use Twitter because the only way they would update it is by SMS (teenagers don’t sit at work all day, see) and they’d rather use their SMS allowance chatting. They go to the cinema, but only until they’re 15, because then you have to pay adult prices. So much for the fabled male 13-24 demographic.
And they hate adverts. This may come as a nasty shock to the agencies and clients who seem to target half their major campaigns at the under-20s (or perhaps just a mental age of under 20, it’s hard to tell, hmph, harrumph). They like virals – score one for the agency playbook – but see website pop-ups and banners as ‘extremely annoying and pointless’. They’d rather listen to last.fm than commercial radio, because it doesn’t intersperse ads (sorry, We7), and on the rarer-than-you’d-think occasions when they get round to watching TV they switch over during ad breaks. They prefer iPlayer, which (a point implied though not explicitly made) they can watch on the living room TV via Virgin cable – more popular than Sky because it’s similar but cheaper, and also, I’d guess, because it comes with the best broadband service. They use YouTube to find more obscure videos and music, but don’t bother downloading hacked films, because they don’t want to watch films on a computer.
Teenagers can’t sign contracts and often lose or break stuff, so they buy cheap phones on pay-as-you go. They don’t use MMS or video chat because it costs extra, but they love Bluetooth (yes! somebody uses Bluetooth!). They hate anything whose battery doesn’t last all day (hello, iPhone team) – again, they’re not sitting in an office where they can recharge. And they don’t have Macs, because PCs ‘are much cheaper… and school computers run Windows’.
Gahh. With a cash mountain of $30bn, would it kill Apple to throw some money at schools? Brits would probably moan about them coming over here getting all anti-competitive on Research Machines’ ass. Boo-hoo. A beautiful state-of-the-art iMac that’s easy to maintain because it’s a Mac, or a bog-standard, slightly out of date PC with easy maintenance features tacked on at extra cost? I know which I’d choose for my kids.
adambanksdotcom They might as well call this Abu Dhabi thing The Festival Of Just Not Getting It