How To: Sell Youth Culture
“What happens when the teen on the street and the teen in the ad lock eyes?”
Imagine you’re in university and you just made a new friend. Getting to know each other, you go out for drinks, go to concerts together, introduce him to your other friends. Now imagine how you might feel after learning that he’s actually a researcher, sent by Nike to document the youth culture of your city — and you’re his case study.
This is a true story a former Nike “cultural marketing” manager told me about his mission to a city in Asia. Rather than study the city from a distance, he got as close to the action as possible, living in a small apartment in an up-and-coming neighborhood. For the largest apparel brand in the world¹ to feel grassroots and local, Nike had to turn the advertisement into a mirror: Do whatever it takes for the teen on the street to see himself as the teen in the ad. This isn’t a new phenomenon.
From the invention of the teenage consumer in 1940s America to the hyper-mediated present, brands shape the images, beliefs, and relationships of teens — but youth culture is nimble, using new media and technology, to push the edges of culture. Teens influence brands, and brands sell youth back in a perpetual cycle of co-creation. What happens when the teen on the street and the teen in the ad lock eyes?
What happens when the teen on the street and the teen in the ad lock eyes?
“There is a time in the life of every American girl when the most important thing in the world is to be one of a crowd of other girls and to act and speak and dress exactly as they do. This is the teen age,” begins Nina Leen’s 1944 photo essay for LIFE Magazine.² World War II is nearing its end, ushering in a new era of middle-class affluence in America. The expanding American middle class is moving out of the city, making their homes in sprawling suburbs across the country. Meanwhile, the rise in part-time jobs for teens during the war, peaking at nearly three million employed in 1944,³ means America’s young adults have spare change in their pockets and a hunger to spend it. By the end of the 1940s, the buying power of American teens reaches eight billion dollars,⁴ and with it an entire constellation of industries, collectively the youth culture economy, is born.
Music and magazines, comic books and teenpics, soft drinks and candy, fashion and beauty — nothing is off the table for companies looking to tap into this newly marketable demographic. For the American teen, a radical sense of rebellious individuality, a distinct identity from their family, converges with a search for a shared popular culture. In this world of her own, the teen is seized by brands who tell her how to look and act. Seventeen Magazine, launched in 1944, is one of the earliest and most influential magazines to define and sell youth culture.
Seventeen’s key innovation was its mastery of the feedback loop: teaching companies all about teens’ preferences and habits, while shaping teens’ desire for those very same brands. This role was pioneered by the magazine’s promotional director, Estelle Ellis, inventor of a highly lucrative marketing campaign named “Teena, the Prototypical Teenage Girl.” Teena transformed the idea of the teenage generation into a market personification, a fictitious composite based on the magazine’s readership, meant to both represent and influence American teen girls. In 1945, Seventeen hired consultants to survey teens and their mothers about their hobbies, their concerns, and their spending habits. Ellis published the market research findings as booklets, “Life with Teena: A Seventeen Magazine Survey” (1945) and “Life with Teena, Volume II: Food” (1947), and distributed them to advertisers, retailers, and manufacturers.⁵
Seventeen backed up the power of the teenage market by translating sales data into marketing material. A 1948 promotional card created by Seventeen reads, “When is a girl worth $11,690,499? When 1738 advertisers spend just that much money in four years to sell her their product and their name in the magazine she reads.”
Through editorial articles and advertisements, Seventeen decided exactly which products teens should desire. Businesses like Seventeen saw teens as a malleable and quantifiable market that could be sold a constructed identity. In the teen’s search for her self, brands say to choose from the catalog.
Advertisers and businessmen weren’t the only ones aware of the teenage consumer revolution. Teens realized this cultural shift firsthand; one in particular figured he could capitalize on it. At the young age of nineteen, Eugene Gilbert launched the Gilbert Youth Research Organization in 1945 to “sample teenagers’ tastes and buying habits for businessmen.” Gilbert ran over 1,900 surveys for clients, from candy bars to the U.S. Army, whose “Retire at 37” slogan was inspired by Gilbert’s finding “that modern youth prizes security over adventure.” The firm’s annual “Teen Trends” survey and “What Young People Think” column were syndicated weekly by The Associated Press in over 271 U.S. and Canadian newspaper outlets with 17 million in circulation.⁶ Gilbert promised to reveal to businessmen the teen psyche and what it took to sell to the burgeoning market.
What compelled a teen to sell teenagehood to brands? Was it a distinctly American obsession with newness? Were the ethical ambiguities simply less obvious back then? Not the case: Even then, those who foresaw the dangers of youth marketing criticized Gilbert’s approach. “The radio research gentlemen, the closest thing we have in this country to a Gestapo, have unearthed another fact,” wrote radio and television critic John Crosby in 1948. “The Gilbert Youth Research Organization, easily one of the most menacing organizations in recent history, has ferreted out the intelligence that the nation’s youth in the eight-to-fourteen-year age bracket have a minimum weekly income (allowance and earnings) of $1.57.”⁷ With access to thousands of teens, Gilbert believed his success came from a simple insight: “Teenagers [are] better than adults at questioning teenagers.”⁸ Gilbert manipulated the teenage market’s ephemeral quality, defining the next trends and fads with his insider knowledge and connections. A dangerously adept deployer of word-of-mouth marketing, Gilbert targeted the “opinion leaders” within schools that were best equipped to identify and influence trends. “Young people have an irresistible impulse to emulate contemporaries whom they admire,” stated Gilbert in a New York Times article. “We decided to provide the leaders with certain products and then let the other youngsters copy them.”⁹ The Gilbert Youth Research Organization distributed free products and marketing materials to “popular” students, the proto-influencers and brand ambassadors of their day.
The teen on the street and the teen in the ad are in constant conversation, mutually influencing each other: youth culture is shaped by consumerism and brands are always chasing the youth zeitgeist. Because they’re so ubiquitous, it’s easy to take brands for granted — they’re designed to be loved. But by shining a light on the system that’s been at work since the 1940s, constructing the American teen as an ideal consumer, my hope is that we don’t “just do it” and, instead, think about what brands do to us.
RECOMMENDATIONS:
- Watch: The Century of the Self by Adam Curtis.
- Read: A Consumers’ Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America by Lizabeth Cohen.
- Browse: The Hartman Center for Sales, Advertising & Marketing History’s digitized collections at Duke University.
- Brand Finance. “Apparel 50 2022 Ranking.”
- Leen, Nina. “Teen-Age Girls: They Live in a Wonderful World of their Own.” LIFE. 1944.
- US BLS. “History of child labor in the US.”
- “Advertising News and Notes.” The New York Times. 1949.
- “Life with Teena: A Seventeen Magazine Survey.” Smithsonian Institution. 1945.
- “Bobby-Soxers’ Gallup.” TIME. 1956.
- Crosby, John. Out of the Blue: A Book about Radio and Television. 1952.
- Macdonald, Dwight. “A Caste, a Culture, a Market — II.” The New Yorker. 1958.
- “Eugene Gilbert, Market Student.” The New York Times. 1966.
