Untangling the Web of Teen Trends

There’s no getting away from those supremely silly power lists that litter the entertainment media landscape these days, crammed with grim visages of the BORWGs--Boring Old Rich White Guys--who run the entertainment business. But if Entertainment Weekly, Premiere and Vanity Fair wanted to go to the real influence brokers, they wouldn’t be running photos of Sumner Redstone and Rupert Murdoch, they’d have a snapshot of a pair of young teens: the girl with a Christina Aguilera CD and an e-mail pager; the boy with a Papa Roach CD and a pair of baggy skateboarding pants.

Teenagers are the tastemakers in today’s entertainment world. With more buying power and demographic clout than ever before, they shape pop trends in every corner of the culture, from music and movies to fashion and technology. If I was organizing a power list, I’d save a spot near the top for someone who really knows what kids like and why they want it.

That wouldn’t be Rupert or Sumner. That would be Sharon Lee and DeeDee Gordon, the founders of Look-Look, an L.A.-based information and research company that connects entertainment, fashion and sports firms to the youth culture. If anyone has a clue about the often inscrutable workings of teen brains, it’s Lee and Gordon, ages 32 and 30, who started Look-Look a year ago after learning the youth-culture trade working at a small Del Mar-area ad agency.

In the old days--let’s say 1997--youth researchers would go city by city to the hip local clubs and playgrounds and interview cool kids about their tastes and buying habits. Today Gordon and Lee have a much more direct pipeline--they use the Internet. Look-Look carries on an e-dialogue with 10,000 respondents between the ages of 14 and 30 who are paid to answer surveys, operate as field managers and serve as photographers documenting new fashion trends with digital cameras provided by the firm.

Gordon and Lee grasp the central concept of today’s Internet-pollinated pop culture: The flow of youth trends has been reversed. For decades it was Hollywood stars and Madison Avenue smoothies who inspired and sculpted teen culture. But today the fads and fashions not only appear--and disappear--faster than ever, but they come from the bottom up, not the top down.

“It’s a lot easier to monitor 45-year-old women because they have more consistent tastes,� explains Lee. “But the only constant with kids is change. They’re different every six months, and that makes people feel uncomfortable because there’s no formula.

“You can’t plug into kids and instantly understand them. So we try to get people to look at kids in a respectful, nonjudgmental way, just as you would do if you went abroad and looked at a foreign culture.�

Today’s kids, they say, know the difference between what’s genuinely original and falsely hip. They can make distinctions (between film violence and real violence, for example) and they hate being condescended to.

Look-Look is tight-lipped about revealing its clients, in part because clients don’t like to admit that they need help understanding kids but also because the firm sometimes does guerrilla marketing that clients hope will stay under the media radar. Look-Look did the “Andy Lives� street posters touting the Andy Kaufman bio-pic “Man in the Moon� last year. Look-Look conceived a street campaign for Sky Vodka, propagating the urban myth that the drink didn’t cause hangovers, which created an instant bump in sales among twentysomething clubgoers.

Look-Look has worked on projects with Universal Pictures and Disney Films, and it counts a top apparel manufacturer and a major professional sports league among its current clients. Universal Pictures Chairman Stacey Snider was so impressed by their work that she invited them to speak at the studio’s corporate retreat earlier this year. And in a case of art imitating life (or is it movie-making imitating marketing?), Jersey Films, which worked with Look-Look on “Man on the Moon,� is developing a movie based on a Malcolm Gladwell New Yorker article about “cool hunters� that included a profile of Gordon.

“DeeDee and Sharon are like urban archeologists,� says Stacey Sher, a partner at Jersey Films. “They’re cross-cultural--they’re not locked into the old ways of thinking. They understand how to spot one trend and see how it relates to another trend and then combine them to create something that translates into mainstream culture.�

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Gordon and Lee make frequent trips to Toyko and London, ground zero for youth culture trends. When they returned from Japan last winter, they told anyone who would listen about the new fad there--fold-up scooters that have since taken the preteen world by storm. Hearing them talk about teenagers is like listening to Click and Clack talk about cars. They are especially eloquent in analyzing why some ad campaigns work and others don’t.

A success: the VW launch of the Beetle (“when we’d poll kids about what music they considered to be cool, they wouldn’t name CDs, they’d say ‘the music in the VW ads’ �) A campaign that fizzled: Pepsi-Cola’s “Generation Next.� As Gordon puts it: “It didn’t understand extreme sports at all. It promoted a real adult idea, that snowboarders are goofballs who say, ‘awesome,’ every two seconds, when in fact they consider themselves serious athletes.�

The company is just weeks away from launching a subscription-based Web site that they hope could attract several thousand clients (at roughly $20,000 a year) from the advertising, show-biz and fashion industries. The prototype site (look-look.com) offers everything from photo spreads on youth style and a William Safire-style explication of the origins of the hip-hop slang phrase “bling bling,� to Top 10 lists about cool teen gadgets, books, actors and CDs. Much of the essay material is written by Look-Look Editor in Chief Mark Lewman, a co-founder (along with film director Spike Jonze) of Dirt magazine, a now legendary kid-culture zine.

Some of the information falls into the “duh!� category; it hardly takes a genius to guess that Eminem would top the teen pop-star list. But other material is more intriguing, including a fascinating essay about how over-the-shoulder bags went from being club deejay and bike-messenger gear to high school accessory. A poll about Napster found that most kids were willing to pay a monthly fee to use the free music Web site and that it had little impact on the amount of music they buy.

“The whole impetus for Napster was getting music easily and efficiently,� says Lee. “But if kids have to spend five hours accessing these files, it’s not going to work. They’re sophisticated enough to know that artists deserve to get paid for their creation. They just don’t want to be ripped off, which they feel the record companies have been doing with CD prices.�

Look-Look has also done extensive research into the other hot teen topic of the day: the impact of violence in entertainment. “It’s a huge misconception that kids learned about violence from the media,� says Gordon. “Kids are not stupid and it’s unfair to cast them in the victim role--they know how to distinguish between real violence and make-believe violence.�

Both women believe it will be difficult for anyone to monitor successfully the marketing of violent entertainment to kids. “Maybe you could have shielded kids 10 years ago when the media was more manageable,� says Lee. “But kids today, with the Internet and instant messaging, kids are too connected. It’s ridiculously easy for them to find out about anything.�

Some Hollywood insiders worry that Look-Look is too hip for the room; its core group of “early adopter� correspondents are so ultra-cool that they might not accurately reflect mainstream teen tastes. And in today’s downbeat Internet environment, it may be an uphill struggle for the firm to woo enough clients to make their Web-research site a moneymaker. But if I were making movies or music aimed at kids, I’d be knocking on Look-Look’s papered-over front door, even if the firm’s offices are on a tumble-down block of Hollywood Boulevard, looking out at a stretch of sidewalk with Myrna Loy’s star on the pavement.

In fact, some Hollywood marketers who’ve been unhappy with the old-fashioned methods of the National Research Group, the industry’s main testing organization, believe that a Web-oriented research company could emerge as an attractive alternative to NRG, whose tracking surveys have failed to accurately predict opening-weekend numbers for a number of teen-oriented movies, including such recent examples as “Bring It On� and “Scary Movie.�

All too often the entertainment industry talks down to kids, assuming they are gullible enough to swallow any “Scream� imitation or Backstreet Boys knockoff. The thing that’s most refreshing about Gordon and Lee is that they actually respect their audience, which is more than you can say for the power list big shots, who tend to view teenagers not as independent thinkers, but a mother lode waiting to be mined.

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