One of my favorite weird genre of news story occurs when the journalist/editor/newsroom all forget how old they are in relation to the people they are writing about. This phenomena is what often gives rise to articles about millenials that don’t actually quote millenials,  or articles about millenial parents of small children that compare them to Boomer parents of teenage children. I also see this in the working world, where there are still seminars about “how to manage millenials”, even though the oldest millenials are nearing 40 (and age discrimination laws!) and new college grads are most likely “Gen Z”.

Anyway, given my love for this genre of story, I got a kick out of a Megan McArdle Tweet this week that pointed out a Mother Jones article that fell a bit in to this trap.

She was pointing to this article that explained how Juul (an ecigarette manufacturer) had been marketing to teens for several years. As proof, they cited this:

Now for many millenials, this makes perfect sense. How could you screen three teen movies like “Can’t Hardly Wait”, “SCREAM” and “Cruel Intentions” and say you were marketing to adults? Well, that depends on your perspective. Can’t Hardly Wait came out in 1998, SCREAM in 1996 and Cruel Intentions in 1999. Current 14-18 year olds were born between 2001 and 2005. Does a party featuring movies made 5 years before you were born sound like it is trying to attract current teens? Or is it more likely that it would draw those who were teens at the time they were released….i.e. those in their early 30s?

As a quick experiment, subtract  5 years from your current birth year, Google “movies from ______”, take out the actual classics/Oscar winners and see how many of those movies you would have gone to an event to see at age 16. I just did it for myself and I’d have gone to see Rocky (though that’s an actual classic) and that’s pretty much it. I enjoyed the Omen, but not until later in college, ditto for Murder by Death and Network. In thinking back to my teen years, I did attend an event where Jaws was screened at a pool party, but I suspect the appeal of Jaws is more widespread/durable than “Can’t Hardly Wait”.

To be clear, I have very little insight in to Juul’s marketing plan or anything about them other than what I’ve seen on the news. What I do know though is that some movies appeal to broad audiences, and some appeal to a very narrow band of people who saw them at the right age. Teen movies in particular do not tend to appeal endlessly to teens, but rather to continue to appeal to the cohort who originally saw them.

There is an odd phenomena with some movies where they do poorly in the box office then pick up steam on DVD or cable broadcasts. The movie Hocus Pocus  (1993)is a good example. It was a flop at the box office, but was rebroadcast on ABC Family and the Disney Channel and then landed on a kids “13 Nights of Halloween” special in the early 2000s. This has caused the very odd phenomena of kids who weren’t born when it was released remembering it as a movie of their childhood more than those in the “right” cohort would have.

So basically I think it can be a bit of a challenge to triangulate what pop culture appeals to what age groups, particularly once you are out of that age group. Not that I’m judging. I struggled enough to figure out what was cool with teens when I actually was one. I have no idea how I’d figure it out now.