Content No Longer King? - trends in electronic marketing to youth in America - Statistical Data Included

American Demographics, August 1, 2001

Envision a mediascape in which all content will merely consist of pretty images of pretty people, images that shoppers can click on to purchase whatever the models are wearing or using or posing alongside.

Of all the new terms foisted upon us by the Internet Age, "content" is particularly heinous. Once referred to as editorial, content seems to sterilize the thing it represents as a grudgingly necessary, if ancillary, element to whiz-bang Flash graphics and bold design and the slick glam advertising that still serves as the raison d'etre for the media business in general.

As the push-button era has given way to the point-and-click age, and as sales departments encroach ever deeper into what were previously considered editorial realms, be it in television, print or online media, actual content is coming to reflect the sterility of the term. The exchange of ideas, once the hallmark of a successful medium, have been dumbed down or simply done away with in favor of fashion or new techno-gizmo spreads in magazines, or preprogrammed, PR agency-supplied b-rolls on local TV news. Entertainment "product," as previously addressed in this space, is increasingly impregnated with "seamless" product placement and ad messages. The hype-wary consumer and the marketing guru alike can envision a mediascape in which all content will merely consist of pretty images of pretty people; images that are little more than product displays that shoppers can click on to purchase whatever the models are wearing or using or posing alongside.

Such visions are taking tangible shape. Techie forecasters have projected that by 2004, 30 million households will have interactive TV set-top boxes - most of them bearing the Microsoft brand or its software and likely offering click-and-buy functions on their remote controls. An e-book by New Age health guru Gary Null, The 7 Steps To Perfect Health (LiveReads.com, 2001), offers purchase hyperlinks for every commercially available product mentioned therein (dietary supplements, juices, air purifiers, etc.). And Teen magazine, the traditional repository of makeup tips and publicity shots of dreamy heartthrobs, this month will relaunch in a format that eschews content to help marketers sell stuff. (Teen and American Demographics are expected to share a corporate parent, PRIMEDIA Inc., under the terms of an agreement reached July 2.)

The new Teen will debut as a sort of hybrid shopping guide and catalog. One of its pages might feature, say, a new cosmetic, offering a product shot, application tips, a Web address for the product or perhaps a retailer, online or terrestrial, at which to purchase the cosmetic, all anchored by a celebrity wearing it.

We should be clear here that such concepts don't really qualify as revolutionary, but rather evolutionary. From Esquire to Cosmo to Maxim to Elle, the crme de la mag biz have long devoted numerous pages per month of thinly-veiled advertorial to sling high-end cosmetics, gadgets and clothing, the latter often "as worn" by celebrities. Meanwhile Teen, no stranger to such fashion collusion, has seen its own traditional position eroded by an onslaught of new entries by more sophisticated publishing brands, la Teen People, Cosmo Girl, Teen Vogue, Elle Girl, ad nauseum. Teen, in dedicating itself to this specialized, yet paramount, component of 8- to 15-year-old girls' lives, is staking out a potential service niche, basically by cutting out the vaguely editorial middleman between it and the common prize: some 15 million teenage girls in the U.S. who wield around $75 billion in discretionary funds.

"I think it's almost a much-needed transformation in what is a very cluttered category," says Michael Wood, vice president at Teenage Research Unlimited (TRU). "Every quarter it seems there's a new magazine coming out for girls, a lot of big players all following a format used for decades now - fashion, life, beauty tips, celebrities, horoscopes, quizzes. It's a tried and true kind of formula, and it worked with five titles on the market, but I'm not sure it works with eight or nine or 10. My hat goes off to them for shaking it off and trying something different."

That something different at its crux speaks to the mall-mad youngster. According to TRU research conducted in January and February, 76 percent of American 12- to 19-year-olds had been to the mall in the past week, and 83 percent of girls had done so. On average, girls spend 5.3 hours a week at a mall; the overall teen average is 4.4 hours. And those numbers, Wood qualifies, are not even in peak malling season, summer. Meanwhile, TRU found that 77 percent have read magazines "for pleasure," in the most recent week, and that segment spends an average of 2.6 hours per week reading magazines.

Of course, per the tech curve, the mall and the magazine will meet online. Teenmag.com will be reconfigured as a part of an overall multimedia matrix. The already well-trafficked site (200,000 unique visitors per month, according to Jupiter Media Metrix) will offer supplemental interfaces with Teen's advertisers/featured subject matter. In one example cited by editor Tommi Lewis in the Silicon Alley Daily, a virtual try-on section might offer Web surfers an idea how a piece of clothing featured in the magazine fits on a virtual template of their body-type, then direct them to a buy-and-ship link.