MEDIA DESIGN PROJECT 1

Kieran Coffey

#200132904

CMNS 428: Stuart Poyntz

The purpose of this creative project was to take a look at some key issues that affect a certain youth demographic. The culture jams created for this project deal with issues around sexual health, pornography, and language in a high-school youth audience. The suggestion is that to reach the high-school youth demographic, there needs to be an element of edginess in order to make a significant impact on the youth audience. Certain boundaries that are often not crossed in this kind of media need to be challenged. This short write up will explain how this was achieved in the ‘Jams and suggest why they could be effective.

The Strategy:

Ad companies spend enormous amounts of time, energy, and resources in an attempt to get into the heads of youth. They use all their tricks of infiltration to find out what’s acceptable, what’s popular, and how youth communicate with each other.

But lets face it: the youth of today are smarter than they are often given credit. By high school, many children have discovered the way in which adults, teachers, and authority figures present themselves and their arguments. By this time, they are often quite versed in the ‘right’ answers and codes of behavior that the adults are looking for, often going through the motions without any real attachment.

So how then do people who want to send a message to the youth go about doing so in a way that really connects with their target audience? When analyzing the evolution of Educational Entertainment strategies in the last 30 years, Thomas Tufte (2004) found that by its third evolution the focus had shifted from broadcasting to audience participation. This was deemed to be the most effective way to create Educational programming that could connect with the audience.

Building on these findings, a great suggestion for reaching youth would be to have the youth create the media themselves. This would eliminate the need for any infiltration or techniques to find a strong connection with the youth audience. However, there is a major drawback to this approach: the youth often lack the knowledge or experience base that is needed to create the strong messages behind the intended Educational Entertainment media.

The task of breaking through to the audience falls to the creators of the Public Service Announcements or Educational Media. In a similar way to how ad agencies infiltrate youth culture, so also do organizations and groups wishing to broadcast messages to them. But even with their exhaustive research into youth culture, the messages still don’t often connect.

In order to break down the barrier between the youth and the educating party, the organizations are going to have to be ready to cross the line that divides them. Despite how adults and teachers discourage it, anyone immersed in high-school youth culture knows that the common language can be profane, the subject matter of conversations is often vulgar or highly sexualized, and that the average youth is well versed in adult culture (despite lacking any real experience for the most part). The youth do not expect the adults to cross the line into this culture that they define as their own.

If a group of Grade 10 students reads a typical public service message with a slightly edgy twist, they are not going to be convinced easily. But if they see a message that has deliberately crossed the line between the educators and the educated, deliberately crossing the line of what typically adults would say to a youth, then they cross that border into their world.

Culture Jams are the perfect media for the educational content as they have the power to use the cultural artifacts and popular figures in youth culture and spin them in a way that challenges established ‘adult’ culture. They have the power to break into the youth culture to transmit a message, but the question still remains: do they do more damage than they do good?

The Jams:

A typical problem with traditional Educational Ads is that they somewhat miss the mark in terms of relevant issues and relevant signifiers that reach the youth audience. To a current audience of high school youths, to hear unpopular celebrities give the ‘STD lecture’ or to watch a dated sexual health video is noticeably ineffective. The first Jam (see Appendix A) takes current star and obvious sexual symbol (mostly to the young boys)Jessica Alba and juxtaposes her image into a fake Valtrex Ad. The youth can already make the connection to what Valtrex is, but by specifically going right for the brand instead of writing something like “genital herpes can happen to anyone,” the ad performs what is known in the advertising industry as a ‘wink;’ it lets the viewer feel that they know something more than an average viewer and are in on the message. For the youth audience that doesn’t know exactly what Valtrex is, the ensuing message should be enough to provoke their interest. The Jam also makes reference to pop culture, where the questionable photos of Jessica Alba with the herpes medicine in hand led to interesting speculation in the pop culture world as to if she had contracted the STD or not. This Jam suggests that it doesn’t matter, for its widespread infection rate it might as well be her or any celebrity you would idealize with a ‘clean’ image. It makes a connection to the tiresome common sex-ed info that the youth receive- “yeah, even her” speaks to the redundant statistics on its wide spread that most youth have heard already.

The second Jam (Appendix B) tackles the often neglected issue of pornography and its effects on a youth audience. By high school, most youth have been exposed to pornography. "Nearly a third (31%) of kids age 10-17 from households with computers (24% of all kids 10-17) say they have seen a pornographic web site” (Utah Coalition Against Pornography, 2008). Although it is mostly considered an issue for boys, the effects of pornography can arguably impact both sexes. According to the Utah Coalition Against Pornography, a NetValue study found that children had spent “64.9 percent more time on pornography sites than they did on game sites in September 2000. Over one quarter (27.5%) of children age 17 and under visited an adult web site… …21.2 percent were 14 or younger and 40.2 percent were female” (2008).

This Jam stabs right into the youth culture by not holding back on the graphic content and references: the wording is sharp and explicit, and the material is considered ‘taboo territory’ for traditional educational media but not for youth’s culture. It tackles the anti-pornography argument which suggests that pornography arguably objectifies women (and men) and sets unrealistic standards for a youth audience to live up to. Suggesting that a family member could be superimposed as a pornography star in a favorite porn movie is a provocative visual statement.

The final Jam takes a stab at an issue that is still a major problem in schools and youth culture: anti-gay attitudes and vocabularies. Calling something ‘gay’ or someone a ‘fag’ is commonplace in youth speech. This Jam doesn’t explicitly tell the viewer to stop doing this, more to consider its implications instead of saying it without meaning. While the words may seem common and thoughtless to common youth, the reality of this is that they reinforce often negative stereotypes and segregation. It plays on the rumors around mixed martial arts fighter Josh Thomson (pictured as the aggressor in Appendix C) suggesting that he was the only openly gay UFC fighter. The UFC league is extremely popular among youth and young adults, and is considered to be hardcore and edgy compared to traditional combat events.

The Implications/Areas for Further Study

A valid critique towards these jams and the edgy media strategy is that they may serve to fuel the youth audience’s use and understanding of vulgar language and sexualized content by attempting to communicate by those means. By deliberately presenting that type of content, it can be argued that it re-enforces negative attitudes in youth simply by providing it more exposure. Also, the educational message behind the jams may be lost behind the edginess or impact if the strategy is taken too far.

Still, the divide between the youth audience and adult presenters exists. Further study may be required in order to test the effectiveness of the strategies suggested in this paper, but at the very least they should stimulate discussion on more effective ways to reach a youth audience.

WORKS CITED:

Tufte, T. (2004). Entertainment-education in HIV/AIDS Communication: Beyond Marketing, Towards Empowerment. In C. von Feilitzen & U. Carlsson (Eds.), Promote or Protect? Perpectives on Media Literacy and Media Regulations. (pp. 85-97). Goteberg: International Clearing House.

Utah Coalition Against Pornography. (2008). Statistics. Retrieved February 1st, 2008, from