CSS YMR Teens Speak at Sony, Bridging the Gap Between Teens’ and Entertainment Industry Leaders
One of the biggest challenges that the entertainment industry faces is appealing to teenage audiences: accurately reflecting the teen experience in storylines, engaging in inclusive and authentic representation of diverse characters, and exploring plotlines that address the issues most important to young people. What industry leaders often miss in their attempt to appeal to a youth audience is, well, youth themselves.
The Center for Scholars and Storytellers is actively bridging this gap through its workshops and youth programming. On October 22, the Workshops team and Youth Media Representation (YMR) team presented to an audience of creatives and media executives on the Sony Studios lot in Culver City, California.
CSS Workshops Director and YMR teens speak to executives at Sony Studios in Culver City, CA.
Adolescent Development and Media
Founder and CEO Dr. Yalda T. Uhls opened the presentation by noting that CSS sits at the intersection of scholarly research, storytelling, and young people – three areas that entertainment industry creatives must understand in order to develop content that will resonate with a teen audience.
Specifically, research can tell storytellers who their teen audiences are and how teens’ brains work. American adolescents are a diverse group: of the 65 million in the United States, nearly half are people of color, and one in four high school students identifies as LGBTQ+. Understanding the complexity and diversity of this demographic is both good for adolescent well-being and good for business.
Exploring Intersectionality in Media
Director of Media Impact Workshops Sheena Brevig presented an abbreviated version of a CSS workshop, challenging the audience to think about the role of overlapping identities in storytelling.
Brevig began by asking audience members to submit two words they would use to describe their identities, ultimately forming a word cloud which included terms like: ‘mother,’ ‘Jewish,’ ‘American,’ and ‘mixed race,’ among others. The visual highlighted the unique experiences of each audience member while also revealing the limits of defining oneself in just two words. The exercise, Brevig noted, underscores the importance of honoring intersectionality in storytelling.
Intersectionality, a framework created by civil rights advocate Kimberle Crenshaw, 1) acknowledges the interconnected nature of social categorizations such a race, class, and gender, and 2) regards these designations create overlapping and interdependent systems of discrimination and disadvantage. Simply put, we are multidimensional people, living at the crossroads of multiple social categories – and some benefit from the confluence of their identities, while others do not. Embracing intersectionality illuminates issues of discrimination, paving the way for us to name the problems we see and address them.
Brevig went on to elaborate the real world implications of intersectionality, addressing the discrimination we often see at the intersection of race / ethnicity and gender, socioeconomic status, and disability.
When creating content for teens, Brevig said, understanding this concept is crucial. Gen Z and Gen Alpha are more diverse than generations before them, and they want to see storylines that reflect their own experience and handle the social context with care. While this challenge to meet adolescents’ expectations and create a healthier dialogue around identity can feel intimidating, it also presents enormous opportunities to tell new stories and share fresh perspectives.
“There’s so much more opportunity for more authentic, more inclusive content that better reflects young people and better reflects diverse audiences,” Brevig said.
Getting the Teen Perspective
Bubba Harris, Youth Digital Marketing Manager at CSS and leader of the YMR Program, briefly addressed the audience, emphasizing how teens want to be known, heard, and represented by creators. His work with CSS, he said, has shown him the power of amplifying youth voices and promoting authentic inclusive representation, backed by research.
Los Angeles-based members of the YMR program then took the stage for a panel discussion and a Q&A to shed light on their experience and their preferences and habits when it comes to consuming entertainment media. Overall, the group expressed a passion for the moviegoing experience, even in the age of streaming, describing the theater atmosphere as “an amplification” of the viewing experience. Some even described the theatergoing as being like “an amusement park” – it can be a thrilling and fully engaging experience with friends. They stressed that certain movies will likely draw them to a theater over watching from home: 1) movies with an exciting visual component that is enhanced on a large screen and 2) movies with marketing campaigns that have sparked a dialogue and excitement, ensuring a fun and engaging audience experience.
Several cited the marketing of the Barbie movie – from its influencer campaigns and TikTok reviews to press junkets to a well-coordinated fashion campaign – as a huge push to see the movie in theaters.
Others noted that they can be easily turned off by a movie’s marketing campaign, particularly in instances where the actors’ reputations or the cast’s apparent discord overshadows the film. They cited “It Ends With Us,” the film adaptation of Colleen Hoover’s bestselling novel, as a film they felt less encouraged to see, particularly in theaters, after reading about disagreements among the cast and reports of star Blake Lively’s “problematic behavior” when giving interviews on the film’s topic of domestic violence.
Audience members then took the opportunity to ask the teen panel questions: Do teens watch TV with commercials? (Sometimes). Does the casting of a movie ever make it a “must see”? (Yes). Do teens still use Snapchat? (Some do). What draws young people to horror movies? What scares teens? (Apocalypse, gun laws, losing rights, misinformation, AI). What are they sick of seeing on TV? What portrayals of teens are ‘cringe’? Who is a ‘comfort character’?
The YMR team answered questions honestly and enthusiastically, offering their refreshingly direct responses, often eliciting laughs from the crowd. It was an incredible example of the impact and learning that can happen when we bridge the gaps between research, youth, and entertainment industry professionals. We can’t thank Sony enough for collaborating on this experience, and we hope to hold even more events like this in the future that help both young people and creators alike.
To learn more about CSS’s Youth Media Representation Program, contact Bubba Harris at bubba@scholarsandstorytellers.com. To coordinate a workshop at an entertainment media company you’re apart of, reach out to Sheena Brevig at sheena@scholarsandstorytellers.com.
Margot Harris is a freelance writer, editor and consultant for the Center for Scholars & Storytellers (CSS) at UCLA. She’s previously worked at organizations like NAMI and Business Insider, where she frequently wrote about topics related to mental health and emerging technology. She holds a Master of Fine Arts in Nonfiction Writing from Columbia University.