Selling the Sizzle While Stealing the Steak
Advertising and Generations

I’m no expert on these things, but the generation gap has been around since the beginning of time. It always has, and always will exist. Parents won’t understand their kids, and their kids will blame their parents for all their woes. All the while advertisers will always be ready to capitalise on these people’s ever-changing tastes and opinions.

One of the most recognisable age groups are the tweens a.k.a teenyboppers. They are the younger kids of the baby boomers who are now around 9-12 years old. I’m mostly referring to girls when I say that they are easy to spot. Just go to the mall, and you’ll find a bunch of these little kids who think that they’re “cool teens” hanging around Claire’s Boutique with their Spice Girl gum, and glitter nail polish. I don’t mean to stereotype them, but these echo boomers usually have the same taste. Ask any of them, and they’ll tell you that their favourite bands are Backstreet Boys, Spice Girls, and Hanson. One of my peeves is that they have a tendancy to think that they’re retro. You’ve seen their “whatever” patches, and funky platform shoes. Oh yeah, and they’re crazy about Leo, seventeen magazine, Buffy, Scream 2, flares, lip gloss, and the list goes on. Although some of my friends like those things too, they seem to be more popular with this age group.

These girls supposedly spend a lot of money, and advertisers want to find a way to direct that cash towards their product. According to an article written by Canadian Business, “unlike teenagers, who become cynical and tend to reject any image that seem to come from an adult source, tweens are an open audience for branded products”.

So, developing brand loyalty is the target for advertisers and marketers, eh? And teens are cynical too? The article goes on to say that tweens tend to stick together and will buy the same thing in order to belong to a group. An advertiser’s dream come true, I bet. Clothing companies, such as Gap Kids, Chateau Junior Girl (le chateau), Roxy, and Delia’s, have already designed a whole line of older style clothing in teenybopper sizes. Cosmetic and food companies have also marketed directly at this age group, complete with ads that they hope will appeal to them. You know, ones with plenty of references to snowboarding/skateboarding, girl power, and the words “extreme” and “cool”. Wait a second, those are found in ads that are aimed at teens too…

Since the teenybopper generation is the next largest in size (compared to the baby boomers), it’s no surprise that advertisers like them so much. The main demographic used to be the baby boomers, but now the focus is directed at their kids, and that includes us, the “cynical” teens.

The kind of things that are featured in ads aimed at teens, is a topic that frustrates me a lot. They almost always show some shallow, brain-dead teenager, who skateboards, listens to rave music, and says “cool” in every other sentence. Have you ever seen one of those Cheerio’s commercial with rock music playing, and snowboarder flying across the T.V screen? No? Then it was probably the GAP Khakis commercial, or maybe it was the Pizza Pops one, or maybe it was…

The complete overuse of the word “cool” or “extreme” in commercials is sickening. The word is beginning to lose it’s meaning (if it even has one) and is quickly becoming more banal every time it is used. Everyone says it. It used to be a slang that only teens used, but now you hear little kids, teachers and yes, even our parents say it. Does the 90’s really want to be remembered for the word “cool”? Are we going down the same path as the 60’s, where it is now commonly associated with the word “groovy”? As for the word “extreme”, that’s just a yet another way advertisers view teens. For some reason, they think that we’re “extreme”. Is it because we have a reputation of being rebellious? Or is it because you think we’re going to fall for a product that treats us that way?

As much as advertisers like to think, teens are not so easily categorised that way. We are more than just labels such as skaters, rappers, ravers, preps etc. Just because younger kids who belong to a clique tend to be similar to one another, it doesn’t mean that teens are like that too. If you were to look within our school, most of the students wouldn’t even fit into one of those categories, or would be a complex combination of each. Unfortunately, many adults do not realise that.

My parents have called me a “typical teenager” and when asked to define that, they draw a blank. So, what exactly is a “typical teenager”? Is there even an answer? If I were to look to television, magazine, and radio ads, or just society’s general view, I would say the answer would be someone who smokes, wears baggy pants, hates their parents, and is apathetic about school. It’s a sad realisation, but it is also something that has to be changed.

However, teens are proving harder to market towards than it seems. Advertisers now have “cool hunters” who work for retail stores to identify growing trends. Trends such as grunge usually start somewhere in the underground/ non-mainstream culture and by hiring these retail scouts, they are trying to spot it before their competition does. Perhaps one thing adults will never understand about teens is their underground culture…

In Japan, they recognise how important teen girls are in spreading the word on new products, and have even gone so far as to hire them to deliberately do that. They also give out free samples, and conduct interview with girls they identify as “trendsetting” to get their opinions on a new product. This strategy has saved Japanese companies millions of dollars in advertising, and they get just about the same results. Once again teens girls are the centre of it all, because these advertisers believe girls can articulate their views better than boys. I know for a fact, that there are girls out there who can’t say anything intellectual beyond the confines of the mall, guys, and school, so I don’t believe that theory.

In the end, who’s to blame for the misrepresentation of the demographics we see and hear in advertisements? Is it our parents for contributing to the stereotype of teens? Tweens, who are currently dominating the market? Or is it just us for just being too damn cynical? Many people would accuse the media, who rarely show real people in their ads. The problem is, they only present ideals of how we should dress, speak, and act.