Devil With A Conscience (sort of)

This blog may be longer than most because there is just too much ‘WTF’ in the story to simplify it all. The consumer market industry is crazy. Literally. I have never seen a pack of hungry investors crammed into a room before, and I hope to never experience it again. I went to the Ypulse Mashup 2007 conference this week and got a taste of exactly what goes into exploiting the teen market. The first day was pretty much a warm-up for the full day session. Two rooms were in use one for a discussion on music and the other on the psychological workings of the teen brain, I think… I wanted to check that one out but ended up going to the music conference instead. I tried to make a tally in my notes of the ratio between adults and who I thought were teenagers. Almost no teens and almost no diversity – it was the whitest gold room in the world. On the second day when I walked into the giant conference room and saw the seats filled with older women and guys in suits while a Justin Timberlake song being blasted from one side of the room to the other. I figured that the plan for the whole conference was to put all these business driven marketers for teens in a room and blast every popular song off the 40 top pop charts in the past year with the hope that maybe, just maybe being amerced in the teen scene would make them understand their teen consumers any better. Later, four teens on the “cutting edge” of the Internet teen industry were rallied on stage to tell the industry bobble heads what they do to get other teens interested in their online companies. One pod casting teen, who hasn’t had any trouble getting sponsorship from companies made me sink further into my seat, “I talk about global warming and stuff…” she said under the giant photo of her that looks more like a display picture on MySpace. A few of the speakers and people running the shindig were people who were originally journalists, who finally realized marketing towards teens is a biggest cash cow of them all. Truth seekers turned marketers… hip hip hooray. I figured I was bound to learn something during the lunch roundtables. I had signed up for the teen blogging topic. The whole thing turned out to be an ad for the blogging website LiveJournal. The entire conference was basically a two day ad for all these companies who have been successful in the teen market, who were not only trotting out their name but at the same time were saying, “You can get teens to love you too if you follow this formula.” At the end, after lunch, when a small amount of the audience went home was when the companies did their whole very convincing display of, “Even though we are trying to make money off poor broke teenagers, we still have hearts and we use those very small hearts to do very small displays of charity.” Little acts of charity verses full blown extortion. I guess even the devil has a little, itty, bitty conscience. -- Eming Piansay