Open Road

Tuesday Jul 14th 2009

Morgan Stanley, stealing our watches to tell us the time

A report by Morgan Stanley’s 15 year old star intern into teenagers’ media habits made the front page of the FT yesterday. Stealing myself for the feelings of inadequacy and resentment reading this child prodigy’s opus would excite, I read a copy. But rather than feeling like an underachiever I am left confused and underwhelmed.

Just to clarify, I’m not having a go at Matthew Robson, whose 3 page paper was concise, well written and displayed a scarily good vocabulary, but I find it hard to find anything surprising or groundbreaking in it about the media consumption of the young.

Teenagers like touch screen phones and funny virals but not banner ads or paying for downloads. They tend not to read or buy newspapers and typically play video games on consoles. This sounds like most teenagers I knew when I was younger, most teenagers I know now and a large number of adults. It also sounds like the sort of thing any decent market research company should be able to tell you. So why on earth were Morgan Stanley (and half of the business world) so impressed?

I’m going to be charitable and assume that part of the reason is that most senior business people are a shade older than I am, and weren’t at school when pagers were replaced by mobile phones, phone calls with MSN chat and actual social interaction with facebook. These digital immigrants are at a natural disadvantage when it comes to young people’s media consumption, because most digital technologies didn’t exist when they were young.

But that doesn’t get them off the hook. The reason Matthew’s paper got people so excited is that anecdotal evidence is interesting and useful, because it can personalise data and sales figures in a powerful way. But that doesn’t change the fact that this is anecdotal evidence that could be produced in a 5 minute conversation with most teenagers.

And that’s what business execs have actually learnt; digital technology users know what they like and why, and they are always the first people you should talk to about it.

Handily for anyone not blessed with teenage children or relatives, but in need of market insight, you are likely to have access to a communications tool that facilitates conversations with large numbers of people across different time zones, locations and languages. So if you want to know about teenagers’ media consumption talk to them. And if you don’t know any get online.