Teenagers of America spend 150 billion dollars a year. Corporate America has them in their hands. They are their play dough; they can mold them into anything. Naturally, all teens want is friends, but friends come with the price of being “cool” and “cool” is purely materialistic. Teenagers reflect the media: the media buys what teens think are cool and sells it back to them, and as soon as those products hit the shelves, they are simply not “cool” anymore. Teenagers keep changing and the media isn’t far behind.
Marketers look like heroes to some teens because they are the only ones who really understand them, and it is the truth. Teenagers are the most studied generation ever as well as the most marketed to, because they have such an influence in the market. Companies will subscribe to websites for 20,000 dollars a year, such as Look-Look.com, just to get an insight into their lives. Marketers don’t just stop at looking at teenagers though, they exploit them in any legal way possible: they categorize them, find out what they like and what they think, and try to understand the inner workings of their minds, they will follow them, go to their homes and study their habitats.
There are no boundaries. Advertisers hire people who are experts in children psychiatry just to try to understand teens. They pick out the leaders of teens and get them to find the next “cool” trend. Teenagers are constantly under the microscope, and they don’t know that the media is corrupting what they know and who they are for money. Every step you take, every move you make, they’ll be watching you.