Teens Don’t Tweet. But Who Cares What Kids Think.
A recent sell-side report in Europe highlighting what young people think about media apparently got a rapturous reception. And it irritated the crap out of me.
Why? Because the report is (at least in summary) the usual youth-obsession whereby researchers traipse around after teens, breathlessly reporting on their whims and predilections. But is it really news to find out that teens would rather not pay for things, or that they think that things that cost money that they can obtain illicitly for free are doomed? I think not.
Here you go, your comment of irritation (via the FT):
Morgan Stanley’s European media analysts asked Matthew Robson, one of the bank’s interns from a London school, to describe his friends’ media habits. His report proved to be “one of the clearest and most thought-provoking insights we have seen. So we published it,” said Edward Hill-Wood, head of the team.
The response was enormous. “We’ve had dozens and dozens of fund managers, and several CEOs, e-mailing and calling all day,” said Mr Hill-Wood, 35, estimating that the note had generated five or six times more feedback than the team’s usual reports.
However, he made no claims for its statistical rigour.
As elderly media moguls gathered at the Allen & Co conference in Sun Valley, Idaho, to fawn over Twitter and fret over their business models, Mr Robson set out a sobering case that tomorrow’s consumers are using more and more media but are unwilling to pay for it.
“Teenagers do not use Twitter,” he pronounced. Updating the micro-blogging service from mobile phones costs valuable credit, he wrote, and “they realise that no one is viewing their profile, so their tweets are pointless”.
His peers find it hard to make time for regular television, and would rather listen to advert-free music on websites such as Last.fm than tune into traditional radio. Even online, teens find advertising “extremely annoying and pointless”.
Their time and money is spent instead on cinema, concerts and video game consoles which, he said, now double as a more attractive vehicle for chatting with friends than the phone.
Mr Robson had little comfort for struggling print publishers, saying no teenager he knew regularly reads a newspaper since most “cannot be bothered to read pages and pages of text” rather than see summaries online or on television.
