I'm working on a proposal right now on how to improve the appeal of a site we recently put out. This site is aimed at teens with the benign purpose of helping them to make healthy life decisions. But the numbers kind of suck, in terms of visitors, so we're trying to improve that.

So right now I'm doing some research on how to "grab" teens. I stumbled into the PBS site on their series "Merchants of Cool." There is this one guy, and every time I read his stuff, I find myself nodding in agreement. Mark Crispin Miller. He's described as "a media critic and the author of Boxed In: The Culture of TV." Listen to this little gem about how media content and marketing to youth has changed:

"And there's another development that I think is significant. If you look back at the youth markets of, say, the 1940s and the 1950s and the 1960s, you're struck by a very important difference, in that the figures who tended to be admired by those masses were somewhat older. Kids admired James Dean. Some like Brando. Elvis Presley looked like he was around 20. The Beatles were in their early 30s. The rock musicians of the 1960s and 1970s were a little bit older. They weren't peers of 13- and 14-year-olds. Now, the young tend to be presented always and everywhere with what is, in a way, the most seductive thing there is, and that's a mirror. There's a mirror held up to them all the time. It's the mirror as constructed by advertising and TV, but it's the mirror that tells you that you are all there is to be, or you could be, if you bought what we have to sell."

The mirror concept was really interesting to me, and he touches on it a few times. I'm a big dork, and I could listen to this kind of stuff all day. You can join me in dorkery, check out his full article here. While the article didn't help too much with my research, it was very enlightening.