5/25 - Merchants of Cool

In the film, “Merchants of Cool” demonstrates the massive industries that research methods and trends to see what teens likes or see as “cool”. With this information, they sell it to corporations to revamp their marketing techniques and sell whatever products teens are into. An interesting aspect of the film was the Sprite segment. Their anti-marketing marketing worked because it made teens feel like they were understood. However, the trend ended quickly and Sprite moved on to use hip hop as a “vehicle for trends”. I was reminded of the reading of Michael Foucault’s article about truth. Foucault argues that the things we hold we true can be dangerous and make us passively unaware if we are not conscious of how the “truth” was created in the first place. The Sprite situation is interesting because the teens challenged the advisements shortly after it was made. They were aware of the intentions of the marketers and pushed away the “truth” that they were told. However, the corporations found a way to connect to them in a more “sincere” way through hip hop, in which hip hop and sprite both benefit each other to have a larger audience/target. The systemic ways of capitalism are honestly terrifying. This documentary is a bit outdated in technology, but the ways corporations track people slyly through metadata to see how they like is the new form of correspondents that film discussed about.