He's still young enough to specify his age in years and months, but Matthew Robson is already a Morgan Stanley market analyst – even if his observations about teenagers' media consumption habits seem rather obvious.
A team at the London-based market research firm asked their young intern (15 years, seven months) to informally report on his friends' interactions with media and the Internet.
The result has blown through the blogosphere, including the Forbes website and on to the front page of the Financial Times, generating buzz in a public eager to understand how the next generation uses technology.
“Without claiming representation or statistical accuracy, his piece provides one of the clearest and most thought-provoking insights we have seen,” team leader Edward Hill-Wood wrote in the introduction to Matthew's report, released last Friday.
“So we published it.”
Among the boy's findings: Teenagers don't listen to the radio, don't read newspapers, don't use the Yellow Pages, and don't like to pay – for anything.
Teens are big fans of social networking sites (Facebook, but not Twitter,) Wii games, music and movies, and prefer cheap or free options with few intrusive advertisements. (And in a stunning revelation, young male Britons watch more television when soccer is on.)
Despite its anecdotal qualities, Matthew's report is generating interest at the firm and beyond. “We're being inundated with calls,” said Julien Rossi, a member of the research team that oversaw Matthew's report. Perhaps in an attempt to stem the tide, employees at Morgan Stanley weren't commenting further Monday.
But it's easy to understand why their phones were ringing. Young people are using media in new ways, and all sorts of companies are keen to tap into those habits.
“This is a topic that touches a nerve for a lot of people, particularly in business,” said John Palfrey, faculty co-director of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School. The effects of Web usage on such industries as gaming, music, movies and newspapers are radical, he said.
About 4.5 million Canadians under the age of 17 use the Internet, according to a monthly study by online research firm comScore Canada. That's almost 19 per cent of the total online population in this country.
About one-fifth of Canada's online multimedia use, social networking and online gaming is done by children and teens. And as various forms of media change, the consumers of tomorrow are changing the way business will be done, said comScore Canada vice-president Bryan Segal.
“Sometimes they are undercutting revenue streams and costing huge numbers of jobs; in other cases they are creating markets that grow by billions of dollars a year,” said Professor Palfrey, author of Born Digital: Understanding the First Generation of Digital Natives .
“What we can learn from the technological usage patterns of young people is nothing short of the future of some major industries,” he said.
This demographic group has been referred to as “digital natives,” that is, those who were born after the rise of social technology and who have the means and the knowledge to tap into it. That's the spur for businesses around the world to understand what young consumers are up to.
But can a single British teenager's observations really serve as a guide book? Among Matthew's observations are that “99 per cent of teenagers have a mobile phone,” that “most teenagers own a TV,” and that “every teenager has access to a basic computer with Internet.” That might be true for the cohorts of a teen with this sort of enviable summer internship, but hardly speaks to the broader youth scene.
Still, Prof. Palfrey says Matthew's insights can be useful.
“It may well be provocative in a way that is helpful to people's understanding of this important and quickly changing topic,” Prof. Palfrey said. “Young people are very different consumers – often more entrepreneurial than some of their older peers. They're eager to talk back to brands, and to do so in public. If you're Morgan Stanley, you're probably smart to try to tap into this sense of entrepreneurship.”
