A 15 year old boy in Britain, doing work experience at Morgan Stanley, wrote up his description of how he and his friends use the Internet. MS subsequently published the report as if someone had handed them a 3 ton chunk of obsidian labelled Internet Era Teenager Rosetta Stone.
Some clue about how unrepresentative of the average teenager someone doing work experience at Morgan Stanley might be, comes from this:
“How teenagers play their music while on the go varies, and usually dependent on wealth –with teenagers from higher income families using iPods and those from lower income families using mobile phones.
Suspicion about whether he asked anyone else other than his possibly small and atypical sample teenager friends comes from the unconvincing and varied terms relating to stats:
“99pc of teenagers”…”Most (9/10)”…”No teenager that I know of”
The last item “that I know of” surely makes the former stats suspicious as generalizations.
And much of the report is just ‘so what’:
“Some teenagers use a combination of sources to obtain music [this says nothing]…Teenagers visit the cinema quite often, regardless of what is on [hardly groundbreaking]…”Most teenagers own a TV”…”Teenagers listen to a lot of music”
And of course, the newpaper industry:
“No teenager that I know of regularly reads a newspaper”.
Yes, nobody reads newspapers, this isn’t teen Spidey Senses in fact, according to one notable, middle-aged man (Steve Jobs) ‘nobody reads’.
In terms of trend insight, apparently outdated phones aren’t cool. Who could have known? What Is Not [hot] includes:
“Phones with black and white screens, Clunky ‘brick’ phones”.
The stuff on display media smacks of being irrelevant:
“Outdoor advertising usually does not trigger a reaction in teenagers, but sometimes they will oppose it (the Benetton baby adverts). Most teenagers ignore conventional outside advertising (billboards etc) because they have seen outside adverts since they first stepped outside and usually it is not targeted at them (unless it’s for a film)”.
Games billboards, as he says are very popular, but anyway one would expect most people of all ages to describe how they are influenced by billboards like this.
No doubt the conclusion, that teens like viral ads, will have agencies rushing to produce forced second rate memes and money pouring into gimmick guerilla marketing, without thinking about the content rather than the medium.
Getting access to what drives buying habits for the generation of teenagers that are growing up surrounded by Social Networks, the Internet and Cellphones is like nabbing the elixir of youth for old farts and bankers.
This makes them easily susceptible to useless crap, as the report released by Morgan Stanley, produced by a 15 year old intern proves. In short, it doesn’t reveal anything that isn’t obvious to anyone who actually uses the Internet or has seen a teenager in the last 10 years. There is no analysis, no sampling no controls or normalization of results – merely hearsay.
The single thing that can be concluded from this is that Internet consultants will be able to bilk large organizations for years to come, because people like Morgan Stanley will buy anything.