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digital culture Fad Gadgets
Lightweight, fashion-conscious and wireless ready apple laptops may be one of the hottest trends among youth--but are these items changing the way trends are spotted?"We have ulterior motives. And they're all good." This comes from a preface to an online grant application on the Look-Look website. Look-Look is an L.A. based company that specializes in gathering information on youth trends, which they then sell to corporations who use them to tailor their advertising strategies. The company has done business with Coca Cola, Nike, and Virgin Mobile U.S.A., among others. Their website lists all of the services they perform, including viral marketing and guerilla advertising, forms of product promotion in which the marketer or advertiser disguises commercial messages in everyday events. Guerilla advertising is the practice of blending advertising into the environment by staging a subversive act. Napster 2.0 attempted this by forging a series of poster advertisements for imagined brands and plastering the Napster logo on them, simulating a grassroots movement. Viral marketing is an attempt to advertise through word of mouth, such as Sony staging actors on the street who tauted the convenience of their camera phones to strangers. In the company’s website, their trends department promises to "encapsulate the most important themes in global youth culture and translate them to meet client objectives." However deceptive these objectives might sound to the youth subcultures they hope to penetrate, Look-Look claims to be an outlet for youth to articulate and a resource for them to pursue their passions. To that end, the company offers teenagers a grant of $500 to "make your dreams come true."Grants such as this are part of a “conversational” approach adopted by more and more advertisers: rather than merely observe their subjects,advertisers are actively engaging them. Using the Web, coolhunters such as Look-Look are blurring the lines between corporate advertising and an open discussion between corporations and the youth markets they cater to. (Coolhunting is a form of research that uses man- on- the-street interviews, ethnographic research, and focus groups to learn that trends are emerging in youth culture. Specifically,coolhunters attempt to find out how youth are thinking and how to turn their interests and attitudes into marketable merchandise and effective advertising for that merchandise. Coolhunting combines the social sciences with corporate marketing, and media savvy with genuine anthropological curiosity. In order to find that elusive piece of capital—the cool-trendspotters have to constantly adapt their strategies, in an attempt to keep pace with the rapidly changing world of youth culture.) The public awareness of how products are marketed to them, made explicit in television shows such as MTV's Making the Band or Fox Television's American Idol, are partially responsible for coolhunters adapting a savvier strategy in their interactions with youth culture.  i pod billboard in San Francisco. Photo copyright 2004, Macrumors.com Dee Dee Gordon, the owner of the Coolhunting firm "Look-Look" whose name has become virtually synonmous with the term Cool-hunter, suggests the increased speed that the Internet provides is responsible for making the traditional, "man on the street" form of Cool-Hunting obsolete."We were the first youth-culture company to create a technology platform to communicate with a broad global audience. We can ask groups of kids questions and have an ongoing dialogue with them. Dialogue is key to what we do." Using digital cameras and computers to create a globally networked dialogue is key to keeping the cool-hunter informed on trends before they become overexposed. Gordon recently launched a magazine based on this concept, also entitled Look-Look. The Look-Look magazine, which is available online, advertises itself as a forum for youth to have corporations hear their voices and opinions. Their mission statement reads as follows: “Look-Look is a youth culture company dedicated to building a community of young and powerful voices and getting their ideas heard by corporations, the media, and adult culture at large. For the past four years, we have been building up a network of contributors-sort of our own CNN but staffed by people between the ages of 14 30. We started out with one person and we’re now 20,000 strong. Over and over again, we kept hearing from our correspondents that they wanted a showcase for their creativity, one that would treat their work with respect and push them beyond their limits. Look-Look Magazine is exactly that. Look-Look Magazine is a bi-annual magazine for young people by young people. It features their photographs, their writings, their drawings, and any other art that can fit between the pages of a magazine. 100% of the editorial content is the work of young people. It is all theirs, completely uncensored. The first magazine of its kind, one made up wholly of submissions from the inside of the outsider’s minds. Enjoy the ride.”  College student using her Apple ibook outdoors. Photo Copyright University of California, Irving 2003 Look-Look’s coolhunting peers at Youth Intelligence have also gotten in on the trend of using Web magazines to gather research and advertise their products. The Youth Intelligence website offers a service called Trend Central. Sporting a design similar to Time Out NY, Trend Central offers bite-size, magazine style articles on emerging trends. "We might as well defer power over to them," said Buckingham, "They are the ones who will lead. They are multi-taskers, and technology is engrained in their culture." The Trend Central website currently hawks a number of hot pieces of technology, such as Apple's ipod, as well as news on mobile- phone innovations and music file-sharing. Terri Senft, a theorist on online social networks at New York University's Interactive Telecommunications Program, suggests that the relationship between market research and consumers is "not 'trickle up,' or trickle anything, but rather follows the model of a dialectic." The "dialectic", a philosophical term used by Hegel, is a model of learning that consists of a thesis and anti-thesis, resulting in a synthesis. Corporations send out correspondents to see what it is consumers want, but when teenagers take in the advertising that saturates pop culture, the new trends that they produce afterwards are heavily influenced by these advertisements. Corporations send out market researchers again, and the cycle begins anew. Author and Media critic Douglas Rushkoff, who researched and narrated the Frontline documentary "Merchants of Cool", used the term "feedback loop" in a similar way, to describe the relationship between market researchers and consumers. When asked how this "feedback loop" has changed in the wake of the Internet trends exploited by Look-Look and Youth Intelligence, Rushkoff said, "the feedback loop is more environmental, now-all around you in the world-than specificallymessaged. It's a brand experience, reinforced by the ads. The ads aren't justthere to sell the products; they are there to enhance the experience of the products." The result of this Net-created "environmental" experience is that coolhunters like Dee Dee Gordon can present Look Look Magazine as both a forum for self-expression and a conduit for corporate market research, without any contradiction. Gordon, still in her late 20's, sees no contradiction in being a coolhunter and a member of the youth subcultures she is researching. To trend spotters like Gordon, cool hunting is a democratic exercise, both neccesitated and aided by the Internet. "Communication," Gordon said, "spreading ideas, learning about things that the speed with which information travels has just accelerated to such a degree that you really need that online real time resource to say, 'This is what's going on.'It's moving faster and faster and faster." Related Links Youth Intelligence PBS' Official Merchants of Cool Website Time Magazine: The Quest For Cool Merchants of Cool Interview With Dee Dee Gordon Roshan Abraham is a graduate of NYU's Gallatin School of Individualized Study, with a focus on media and cultural studies. He is ReadMe's Op-Ed and Driftnet Editor and a writer on technology, media and music for Disinfo and Pixelsurgeon. |
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