Popular youth culture is often considered ‘cutting-edge’ or involves a form of expression that works in opposition to a mainstream culture as promoted by adults, corporations and schools. Therefore advertising that appeals to youth culture considers what young people believe to be cool and interesting so they can cultivate this growing market and its long-term brand loyalty. There are two significant areas of interest when studying advertisements that appeal to young people. One is, again, a question of representation. In order to bottle this ‘counter-cultural’ spirit, what do young people look, sound and act like in the mass media? 

The second is in the study of the cycle in terms of what is seen as new, fresh and original. In many youth sub-cultures, young people push away from what is seen as corporate and develop a rebel style all their own. This new style has very strong appeal, however, and may be quickly copied by commercial producers wishing to profit from what is cool and new. Therefore, corporations put a lot of time, effort and money into predicting and determining what the next big thing will be in youth culture. This effort results in a ‘feedback loop’: To find out about this phenomena, watch the Merchants of Cool documentary (above), and explore these articles: 

• Selling Youth? (Media Magazine article)
• Driving Teen Egos (American Psychological Organisation cover story)
• Tweens and Teens (MediaSmarts special issue article)
• Media Casts Youth in a Bad Light (Guardian article)
• The Portrayal of Youth in the Media (article at Pressing the Future)

Reading Challenge

This is a longer and more challenging text, but spending time on this piece, and discussing it with your teacher, will help you master this topic:

• Colonizing Teens (essay published on Frigatezine)

Class Activity: coolhunting

Create a brainstorm in pairs, small groups or as a class. Try to define what is ‘cool’ for young people today. Provide examples of things that are ‘cool’ as well as expressing what makes those things, and not other things, cool. Share your ideas with other groups or classes. Can you come to a consensus on what is ‘cool’?

Discussion Points

1. What is ‘responsible advertising’? If a company is communally responsible, what does that mean? Do you think advertisers have a responsibility towards society or the consumers they are targeting? Do you think adverts should have a special responsibility towards children? What might this be?
2. Advertisements for jeans and perfumes tend to be more overtly sexual than those for other products. Why do you think this is? Do you think ‘sex sells’ still works as an adage? Do you think the sexuality you see in advertising is authentic? What other kinds of sexuality might there be?
3. Do you think adverts influence young people as to how to behave in society? Do you think the media is to blame for, for instance, acts of violence or anti-social behaviour? Where else do young people get messages and values from? What makes media messages so powerful?

Learner Portfolio

Select a real company with an international range that markets ‘cool’ products towards young people: this could be a TV company like MTV, a clothing company, a games company, or another brand aimed at young people. Create either a written or spoken report for the CEO of this company. At the heart of this report should be the understanding that the meaning of ‘cool’ is not fixed; it changes from place to place, person to person, and culture to culture and is subject to the forces of the ‘feedback loop.’ How will your chosen company be able to trap the lightning-in-a-bottle of whatever is ‘cool’ right now?

Paper 1 Text Type Focus: texts for young people

Body of Work: Diesel Advertising Campaign†

Diesel’s new campaign from Anomaly New York is just plain stupid. The risqué work celebrates stupidity as a kind of liberating antidote to intelligence, which, in the current political climate, you might think is a dangerous philosophy to have.

According to the brand’s ‘Be Stupid Philosophy’: “Stupid is the relentless pursuit of a regret-free life. Only stupid can be truly brilliant.” The print and billboard campaign in this Body of Work is part of a wider strategy, including encouraging people who are ‘doing something stupid right now’ to feature in a collaborative music video. You can find out more about the entire campaign here.

For the purposes of your study, you might like to discuss the way young people are represented in these adverts and explore the way certain adverts use genre tropes and elements of both visual and written language to appeal more or less successfully to Diesel’s target audience of teenagers and young adults. (If you want to find out more about how to analyse a visual text, you might like to visit Can a Picture tell A Thousand Words?)

Towards Assessment: Individual Oral

Supported by an extract from one non-literary text and one from a literary work, students will offer a prepared response of 10 minutes, followed by 5 minutes of questions by the teacher, to the following prompt: Examine the ways in which the global issue of your choice is presented through the content and form of two of the texts that you have studied. (40 marks)

The Diesel Advertising campaign would work very well as a non-literary text in your Individual Oral assessment. Here are two suggestions as to how you might use this Body of Work to create a Global Issue. You can use one of these ideas, or develop your own. You should always be mindful of your own ideas and class discussions and follow the direction of your own thoughts, discussions and programme of study when devising your assessment tasks.

Possible Literary pairings

• Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice – look at the way the younger characters in the play are portrayed, particularly: Bassanio when he speaks and behaves in Act 1; Jessica’s character as portrayed in Act 2; Jessica and Lorenzo in Act 5, Scene 1. To what extent are they portrayed as flippant and superficial (I’m looking at you Bassanio) as those in the Diesel campaign?
• Dai Sijie’s Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress – this coming-of-age novel tells the story of three teenagers as they come into their maturity against the backdrop of Chairman Mao’s cultural revolution in early 70s China. A perfect pairing with the Diesel advertising campaign.
• Keats’ Selected Poetry – in terms of the Field of Inquiry of Art, Imagination and Creativity, poetry is inherently creative, and you could compose a talk about how Keats peels away the popular definition of words (such as ‘beauty’ or ‘melancholy’) to suggest new understandings; in a similar way, you can explain how the adverts in this campaign repurpose ‘stupidity’ as an act of creativity.
• Kadare’s Broken April – this novel exposes the cruelty of society in regard to how young people might be treated. Expectations for boys and young men are very different on the Albanian High Plateau and the behaviours of young people in the Diesel campaign are unlikely to be tolerated…
• Shaw’s Pygmalion – you might look at the speech and actions of Freddy and Clara more closely in light of the behaviours seen in this advertising campaign.
• David Mamet’s Glengarry Glen Ross – in this dark comedy, the meaning of words is never fixed. Communication is only ever a one way street, and you can’t trust anything you hear. This play would make a good pairing in the field of inquiry: art, creativity and imagination.
• Selected Poetry by Charlotte Mew – in her famous poem The Farmer’s Bride, Mew depicts a society that has very different expectations of young people – or, more accurately, young women – who were expected to marry and bear children for their husbands. This could potentially make an excellent pairing with the Diesel Be Stupid campaign.
• Life of Pi by Yann Martel – Pi is anything but a typical teenager and offers an effective counterpoint to the images of young people presented in this campaign. Something they do have in common though, is the way they like to tread their own path, despite how authority figures in their lives might prefer them to behave.

Wider Reading and Research

• Childhood and Children’s Literature – to find out more about writing for young people in the Romantic and Victorian times, visit this fantastic British Library resource, browse and read some of the interesting articles curated on this site.
• Prisoners of Pop Culture – an article by Bob Hoffman, the self-styled ‘Ad Contrarian’, that discusses breaking advertising’s dependency on youth.
• Museum of Youth Culture – this fantastic resource traces the history and identity of youth movements in Britain throughout the 20th Century and into the new millenium.
• Impact of Media Use on Children and Youth – National Library of Medicine research