The movie begins by saying the fact that during the last years, teenagers started to see the marketing companies as enemies and started to hate and avoid them. To illustrate this, the example of Sprite was given. In the early 1990’s, sprite was losing consumers and, a market research was made to see what was happening. The result of it was that teenagers thought that Sprite was advertising too excessively and as a consequence teenagers began to avoid the brand. After a lot of research and ideas, Sprite found out that just commercials were not enough to attract teenagers; they had to get involved in the teenagers’ culture and lifestyles and look cool.
To achieve its objectives Sprite began a new marketing campaign to try to connect its name to the Hip Hop culture. Sprite sponsored Hip Hop parties and concerts, contracted famous artists and singers to perform under the companies’ name and used many other techniques with the same purpose. At the end, Sprite had the number of its customers increased and effectively associated its name with the Hip Hop culture. “Hip Hop became the vehicle for us to talk to kids”
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Then, the movie related the example of Sprite to a technique used by marketing industries: Under-the-Radar Marketing. It is used mainly by companies that are trying to associate their brands with cultures in the same way as Sprite did. It consists of paying teenagers to influence other teenagers by giving opinions that are biased according to the companies view or by distributing promotional material. The movie ends up by mentioning that most of the media that ‘controls’ cool are composed just by 5 companies:
Viacom
Universal Vivendi
News Corp
Disney
Aol Time Warner
A good quotation from this movie is “Teenagers for these companies are like Africa for the colonizers”. It says that the companies exploit the teenagers and get the maximum [profit] out of them.
