Father Kavanaugh worries that advertising is shaping our cultural values because advertising is pre-packaging cultural identities with products so people will buy them. This new idea of products being portrayed not for what the consumer will get out of them but instead what person the product can make you is leading people to feel like they must express themselves through consumerism instead of developing their own values and cultural identity. As Kavanaugh puts it, "what is really sold is not the product because we don't need the product; what we need however are the values associated with the product." Consumers feel less of a need to relate to people because they feel it is their products that define who they are.

The Merchants of Cool shows advertisers using focus groups and other various methods so that they can target the next trend and then sell it to the kids. They try to sell kids an image to model themselves after, again crushing people's sense of individuality. Guys are presented with the mook. A loud and obnoxious character marketed with many different faces but always the same at heart. It isn't a real person, just a model that the media wants teenagers to model themselves after to make it easier to market their products to the teens. The girls are presented with an equally unrealistic but potentially more dangerous model, the midriff. The midriff is a scantily dressed female who uses sex as her primary weapon to get what she desires. The idea is to make girls want to use their sexual appeal to it's fullest extent so the corporations can sell them clothes, cosmetics, etc.. Kids buy into what they are shown on T.V. and give it right back on shows such as Spring Break, all contributing to the continued moral breakdown of the youth to make way for marketing. When kids do rebel against the media's pre-packaged view of them, the idea of what's cool will shift itself around the new fad, making it mainstream and thereby taking away the rebellion. The kids who buy into it, however, still see it as a rebellion against the media and make it all the more easy for them to be reached through advertisements.

The Merchants of Cool seems to be saying the same essential thing as Kavanaugh said 20 years earlier, that advertisements are selling us our cultural values through products and thereby destroying most peoples sense of individuality. However, while Kavanaugh focuses on the advertisements themselves, Merchants of Cool focuses on the method by which the latest trend is developed and ways that the media changes the people themselves to make them more willing to accept the values that are presented with the products. While Kavanaugh has a more eloquent way of expressing his views on the subject, the core problem seems more urgent in Merchants of Cool, as it shows the way that the media can and is changing teens to make them into good consumers. This could potentially breed a generation of yuppies all chasing after the latest trend with no semblance of true individualism.