Plug the band, get the t-shirt (The Times (London))
April 28, 2003
TEENAGE MARKETEERS WHO "HELP" LARGE COMPANIES TO PROMOTE GROUPS AND PRODUCTS ARE NOT PAID, YET THEY ARE QUEUEING UP TO DO IT. ALISSA QUART LOOKS AT THE PHENOMENON OF JUVENILE SALES TEAMS
ANNA WAS 15 when she joined her first "street team". Three years ago she spotted a request on a music website for young people to work promoting bands to other teenagers.
Anna started out doing promotion for a London-based company called Digital Outlook. She e-mailed DJs and wrote to magazines on the bands' behalf. She received no money for her labour, but she was given rewards, such as T-shirts, gig tickets and CDs.
In the course of her short career, Anna has promoted Avril Lavigne, the Foo Fighters, allSTARS, Hear'say, A-Teens, Enrique Iglesias, Blink 182, and many other groups.
"I let people know I'm a teamer," Anna tells me. "You feel important saying that."
Anna is one of many teenagers who market entertainment and products to other teenagers for free. It's all part of a larger trend, so-called "peer-to-peer" or "viral" marketing ("viral" because it's delivered by word of mouth - literally or via the internet).
The appeal of viral marketing lies in the fact that it is cheap - and clever.
Teenagers are bombarded with conventional advertising and have become resistant to it. Viral marketing, which is more personal, and which comes via their own peer groups, has become the great hope of those trying to sell to the niche teenage market - a niche that spends Pounds 900 million a year, according to experts at last year's Teen Power conference in London.
In the UK, teenagers like Anna sign up with street-team companies, which include Traffic Online, Digital Outlook and the Nottingham-based Promo-Team. These firms work to attract and mobilise groups of teenagers to promote bands online, to video and radio programmes, at gigs, shops, schools, and in clubs and skate parks.
In return, the teenagers (typically aged 14 to 19) receive freebies - T shirts, concert tickets, stickers and so on. But perhaps the most important reward is an affiliation with the band or product, and a sense of inclusion in a world bigger than themselves.
In the United States, a large number of bands have teenage street teams, who even send out mass mailings to magazines and television programmes urging them to put the stars on their pages and in their shows. The Backstreet Boys, Nelly, Jones Soda and even the environmental body PETA have street teams.
Street teams are just one example of how adolescence has become commercialised.
Credit-card companies in the US enlist students to promote their cards at public events, and soft-drinks companies get young bloggers (people who keep weblogs - online diaries), to write about their favourite new drinks on their web diaries.
Some American companies have been gathering personal information about children in schools, including their home addresses and exam grades, and selling it to companies targeting the teen market.
In another development, the daughters of American sales reps who work for the cosmetics line Mary Kay have been recruited to sell the brand's new teen line, Velocity, to their friends at cheerleading parties and bridal fairs. Teenagers routinely "work" for magazines and companies as product consultants or focus group members. One teenage boy in New York told me that he was rounded up while playing basketball to take part in a focus group and discuss which Converse slogans most made him want to buy the shoe.
Another teenager said of her focus-group experience: "They showed me an ad that was so superficial, the girls emaciated, the copy weird. I showed them how to make them more real."
The new batch of fashion-led teen magazines, the latest being Teen Vogue, ask their readers to become trend-spotters or, in the case of Teen Vogue, "It Girls".
Teen Vogue's "It Girls" may receive "early invitations to events" but they are also expected to answer "questionnaires that let you express yourself to Teen Vogue advertisers".
Of course, using teenagers to sell to their peers - and making them feel special while they do so - is not entirely new. Girls were rounded up and paid to scream for Frank Sinatra in the 1940s. In 1956, Hires Root Beer may have been the first brand to use what was then called "youth-to-youth" promotion.
Hires went from high school to high school, at each place choosing a "leading" girl to pitch the product to her classmates. The Hires girls were instructed to contact the concession managers for school sports events, as well as the managers of local drugstores and grocery stores, to tell them how great the drink was and how much young people liked it. They were also asked to sell Hires at school events. The girls were then asked to hold Hires Root Beer parties, where they were to introduce other students to Hires and keep a record of their classmates' feedback about the product.
The concept of teen-to-teen marketing evolved, and street teams as they exist today emerged in the 1980s with reps selling hip-hop music directly to fans on street corners. But the street teams of today are more sophisticated than those of the past.
Promo-Team gets its 40 to 50 "dedicated representatives" - a group culled from its base of 2,000, mostly teenage, members - to write reports on the best record shops and the most popular pubs, thus singling out these places as publicity targets for the Promo-Team army at large, which visits them to hand out stickers, flyers and merchandise about the artists whom the company represents.
Promo-Team's 21-year-old founder, Simon Cavalier Jones, a well-spoken former street teamer who peppers his conversation with references to sociology, explains the willingness of youngsters to give free hours to the task of marketing: "They enjoy promoting."
Promo-Team's rival street-team company, Traffic, similarly describes its teams as "committed music fans" who can "potentially reach thousands of new fans for their team's band/project very quickly".
Both companies strenuously assert their alternative-rock credentials and the fact that they are harnessing an existing organic alternative-rock fanbase for commercial aims. Promo-Team's bands include Headstrong, One Minute Silence, and Soil.
Meanwhile, the Traffic website represents its bands as underexposed creative talents whose underground status can only be overcome (or reaffirmed?) by an unpaid teen sales force.
Without the street teamers' help, Traffic claims that the bands would "sadly remain unknown because there is such limited opportunity for exposure through the few decent press, radio and TV outlets that exist in the UK".
"Alternative" credibility is a seductive selling point for some street-team companies (even though big record labels are more often than not behind supposedly "edgy" bands).
Street-team companies in the UK and the US often portray their artists as grassroots acts that are in real need of support and assistance from their adolescent fans - even if the bands are in fact the creation of leathery skinned music promoters in Florida. It's a smart move. The street teamers and trend-spotters want nothing more than to serve something they can imagine becoming big and true and part of the world of adult power.
As Anna says, "I think it's great to advertise to teens. Most of the music is aimed at them and they need to accept a new concept."
American teamers tend to talk to me about their work as if it were a political cause: they tell me that they like "helping" companies by e-mailing their corporate contacts for hours each week, testing stay-on lipsticks for them and sitting on focus groups; they feel "important" helping a teen magazine to create an advertisement; they love the bands who employ them as street teamers - sometimes even more than they love their families and friends.
And paradoxically, the very existence of these new, unpaid promotional armies is a testament to teenagers' incipient idealism. The difference in the 21st century is that this idealism is now being poured into commercial promotion.
For today's teenagers, being an unpaid salesperson is not a chore. It's a high compliment - even though you are underage, you are part of the club of celebrity and you have a certain utility. Indeed, this free labour even provides young people with a sense of selfhood. Unfortunately, it tends to be before they have recognised that they have a self.
Branded by Alissa Quart is published by Arrow on May 1, Pounds 6.99.