In Fr. Kavanaugh's video "Advertising, Consciuosness & Culture: The Depersonalization of American Life," he talks about the influence of consumerism and materialism on America's people. He said that advertising shapes our values in that one of our topmost values is to look good and wear the fashionable name brand. He talked about how Americans are formed by the media instead of our religion. The media also has become the thing that Americans look to. They look to the media on what movies to see, what music to listen to, what clothes to wear, and how to act. What the media does is what alot of people think is what they should do. Many people's happiness is determined by their connection to what the media is selling. If they dont have the shoes on the billboard or wear the jeans from the TV commercial they aren't happy. Fr. Kavanaugh said,"The millions of advertisements we are assaulted by have one pervasive, dominant message: you and i are unhappy, we are even meaningless without products and the promises the products make and if we can only buy enough of them we will be happy. Not only will we find relational fulfillment we might even find ourselves." Because of all this, Fr. Kavanaugh worries that we will lose touch with our morality and connection with other people and focus only on what affects us. this loss of touch with the rest of the world, Fr. Kavanaugh fears, will result in the dehumanization of ourselves by worrying too much about ourselves.
The Merchants of Cool was all about the relationship between the media and teens. Teens, who make up for $150 billion a year in consumerism, are the main target of the media and their marketing. Marketers have "cool hunters" and other experts who look at teens and interview them to find out what the cool thing is. Marketers also run "under-the-radar" marketing research, hiring teens to promote products in online chat rooms and at parties. But once discover that their cool thing is being over advertised in the media, they find something else that is cool and the marketers process begins all over again. What these marketers have discovered is that the relationship between teens and the media is what they call a "giant feedback loop." The media looks to the teens to find out whats cool and the teens look to the media to see whats cool. Teens are inspired by the media to be what the marketers call either "the mook" or "the midriff." "The mook" being a fun, crazy, guy who self inflicts pain for humor and "the midriff" being the girl who wears sexy clothes and acts in certain ways to attract boys. Another thing the marketers discovered is that the concept of "teen rebellion" is just another product to be sold, examples being the band Limp Bizkit "selling out" by promoting their music on MTV. What the movie The Merchants of Cool tells us is that the value in teens' lives is to be "the mook" and to be "the midriff." They look to MTV and advertising to see whats cool. They worship bands like "ICP" that are undewr the radar and not mass-marketed.
The message from The Merchants of Cool is almsot exactly the same as the message from Fr. Kavanaugh. The only two differences are that The Merchants of Cool focuses on only teens, and not all ages and that market reseach is a larger part of advertising than it was 20 years ago. But the message is jsut the same. Teens becomes so wrapped up in how they look and what they have and dont have, that they forget about the world around them and what it's really about.