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A research note written by a 15-year-old Morgan Stanley intern that described his friends' media habits has generated a flurry of interest from media executives and investors.The US investment bank's European media analysts asked Matthew Robson, an intern from a London school, to write a report on teenagers' likes and dislikes, which made the Financial Times' front page today.
His report, that dismissed Twitter and described online advertising as pointless, proved to be "one of the clearest and most thought-provoking insights we have seen – so we published it", said Edward Hill-Wood, executive director of Morgan Stanley's European media team.
Read the full report in The Guardian [guardian.co.uk].
Syzygy
I give Twitter 2 more years, perhaps 18 months, and people will get sick of it, just as they did with MySpace.
I agree. Twitter is utterly pointless in my life. It allows obsessed fans to keep up with their idols. That works until the "idols" get sick of tweeting and move on to something more constructive.
I give Twitter 2 more years, perhaps 18 months, and people will get sick of it, just as they did with MySpace.
I completely agree. There is a thread here where I basically made the same statement and some people thought I was crazy.
But this Twitter thing is really useless. If young kids have abandoned it (and they did a year ago) and moved on to something else ... its doomed.
Whilst some of the points made may seem obvious, all told the observations are quite fascinating.
Syzygy
I imagine the author, being a Morgan Stanley intern, has devised a business model that allows capitalism to function with consumption being funded by neither direct nor indirect means.
Or, possibly, maybe he could create a market based on a lie that nobody else can understand until its too late. Now, if only he worked at a company that had a history... oh, wait.
"Write a story about your friends and Morgan Stanley will publish it"
The problem though is that the report is complete #*$! and even Morgan Stanely admits it; the introductory note states that the report isn’t “claiming representation or statistical accuracy” and that the report is based on asking the author to “describe how he and his friends use media.”
Syzygy
But then that hurts the brand of Google in these kids eyes.
Somebody needs to teach them you get what you paid for (in the long run anyway).
OK, maybe that sounds silly, but I have seen some pretty silly things in my life.
As a previous generation might have said at that age, its just lame man.
Now, pop songs when I was young...
If they added a few Pepsis here, and an iPod there, it would probably increase artistic value. :)
Frankly, I'm not surprised that Twitter doesn't appeal to those in their mid-teens.
Unless they're annoyingly precocious they're not likely to have started their own commercial or charitable organisation or movement or campaign, so they're not yet reaching out to a 'follower community'.
Furthermore, territorial as teenagers are, they're not likely to be talking much to the school pupils in the years above or below them, never mind pupils at other schools.
So everyone in their potential twitterfeed audience is in touch with them by direct SMS anyway. So why any need to broadcast one-to-many SMS messages?
The author needs to work on thinking about which conjunctions to use (didn't we all at that age?) and his comments on consoles and PCs were a bit mixed up - by the end of the paragraph he ends up contradicting what he said at the beginning - but in general I think this young man shows a lot of promise.
LOL @Shaddows
I'd agree the view of the young is to get stuff free and to not allow for other ways to make money off of it. Which they're not old enough to know of is a structure that "will not last" as it is not sustainable.
I suspect they just don't want to pay for 'virtual' things (music, info etc.) which I think is quite understandable. I think you'll find most young people would be quite happy to pay to go to a music festival or concert, and this is where musicians/performers will have to make their money in the future. And I think most people would welcome a return to an emphasis on live music rather than studio produced stuff of sometimes dubious quality.
There's also a number of tv formats that try to find talent.
how do you fund new bands before they can fill stadiums?
Gigs in smaller venues. Some bands can earn enough this way to only have to work part time, so they do have some time to spend recording stuff and rehearsing and preparing for the big time!
Selling T-shirts and CDs at the gigs can also be a good source of income. Maybe people would be more inclined to buy a CD when they're in the party mood, rather than paying for it online, especially if it's priced quite reasonably.
