If 15-year-old Matthew Robson was anything like me, he’d have spent most of his work placement at Morgan Stanley wondering where the toilets were. Instead, this morning’s Financial Times boasts the front page headline “Media research note by ‘teenage scribbler’ causes City sensation”. This is a very worrying development for all concerned.
The story goes that Morgan Stanley’s European media analysts asked Robson, an intern from a London school, to describe his friends’ media habits and his report proved to be “one of the clearest and most thought-provoking insights we have seen. So we published it,” said Edward Hill-Wood, Morgan Stanley’s chief media analyst. That’s Morgan Stanley’s current chief media analyst. For Mr Hill-Wood is right: Robson’s note is a joy to read.
First of all, there are amusingly pithy dismissals of such old-century concepts as the Yellow / Golden Pages: “Teenagers never use real directories. This is because real directories contain listings for builders and florists, which are services that teenagers do not require.”
Some of Robson’s sideswipes might be more surprising to anyone over the age of 21. The idea that teenagers can’t exhale without tweeting about it is laid to waste with devastating logic: “Teenagers do not use Twitter. Most have signed up to the service, but then just leave it as they realise they are not going to update it (mostly because texting Twitter uses up credit, and they would rather text friends with that credit). In addition, they realise that no one is viewing their profile so their ‘tweets’ are pointless.”
This is hardly a ringing front-line endorsement for the future of Twitter, on a day when co-founder / chief executive Evan Williams made it into the top 10 of the annual MediaGuardian 100 most powerful people in the industry.
In fact, unless they lower their prices, interested parties should pretty much give up marketing mobile web services at people young enough to be pocket money-dependent: “Teenagers do not use the internet features on their mobiles as it costs too much, and generally, if they waited an hour they could use their home internet and they are willing to wait as they don’t usually have anything urgent to do.”
Apart from taking over the world, that is.
The note ends with a “what is hot / what is not” list with which it is hard to argue. What is hot? “Anything with a touch screen”, mobile phones with large capacities for music, portable devices that can connect to the internet (iPhones), “really big tellies”. What is not? “Anything with wires”, phones with black and white screens, clunky “brick” phones and devices with less than a ten-hour battery life.
The only consolation to this rampant display of precocious adolescent competence is that Robson is bound to be teased on his return to school by Morgan Stanley’s decision to declare his age as “15 years and seven months”, as if he was a pedantic toddler. Mr Hill-Wood, meanwhile, has condemned the career of a City analyst to the criticism that “even a child could do it”.
This is not to throw stones at the analyst community, who have proven success in charging their clients fees for their insight (or lack of). Like it or not, the children are coming. Teenage workplace participation rates may be falling faster than among any other demographic group, according to the CSO’s Quarterly National Household Survey, but no amount of ladder-pulling college fees, employment legislation or economic depressions are going to leave the young to their Wiis forever. The Irish Times frequently plays host to small pockets of bright-eyed students, most of whom look like they’ll be all too capable of running the show - and have great hair while they do so - when the swine flu pandemic wipes out the rest of us.
The one small comfort is that no self-respecting teenager would want to work for a newspaper anyway. Unfortunately, this is because they don’t read them. In the words of Matthew Robson, the Morgan Stanley wunderkind: “No teenager that I know regularly reads a newspaper, as most do not have the time and cannot be bothered to read pages and pages of text while they could watch the news summarised on the Internet or on TV.”
Well, when you put it like that…
