TWEEN & TEEN GIRLS SPEND MORE HOURS EVERY DAY WATCHING ENTERTAINMENT THAN ANYONE ELSE - SO WHY ARE THEY UNDERSERVED?
Teens spend an average of nine hours a day in front of a screen, and several of those hours are for entertainment. Yet finding content for teen girls can be challenging. They want relatable yet fascinating storylines, imperfect characters and new worlds within which they can become lost, or at least distracted enough from their digital life to put down their phone for a while. A lot of early teens feel peer pressure to watch the latest buzz-worthy young adult (YA) films and series yet that entertainment is often beyond what is best for kids at that age, emotionally and mentally speaking. As an industry, we aren’t giving kids in their early teens the entertainment they want.
If we look at the publishing industry and see how they handle content for teens, you will find the term Clean Teen, which delineates YA books for precocious readers and their parents. In a Publisher’s Weekly article, Anne Heltzel, executive editor at Abrams’s Amulet imprint, shares her thoughts on the need to identify books for the early young adult years, “There’s a need for YA novels without risqué content, because of course there are loads of bright young readers who read up, and parents of these kids don’t want to worry about their children encountering difficult content before they’re ready.”
“Kids ages 11 to 14 spend an average of nine hours per day in front of a screen. ”
I agree with Anne and I believe it is also true for series and film. However, the need is compounded in entertainment because Teens 10-15 years old is a relatively unidentified space, because it falls between the traditional development buckets of Kids & Family and Young Adult. Development for Kids & Family tends to skew young, focusing on the 6-9 year old kids. Over the last few years YA content, originally bridging the gap between kids and adults targeting 12-18 year olds, has been crossing over into adult with darker and more emotionally mature themes. YA shows like Euphoria, 13 Reasons Why or even Titans tackle themes and/or embrace a level of violence that isn’t ideal for even the most precocious early teen. This leaves a powerful demographic being underserved in their content needs. Traditional entertainment companies are quick to bemoan tweens and teens spending so much time on Tiktok and Youtube, away from series and film, but have been slow to evolve and create. I believe as an industry we need to better understand the value in developing content for this growing demographic.
Euphoria ©WarnerMedia | 13 Reasons Why ©Netflix | Titans ©WarnerMedia
Understanding the social, mental, physical and emotional transformation happening all at once in kids between 10 and 15 years old is important when developing content for these tweens growing into teens. One of the biggest mental and social changes that occurs during this time period is that they begin to think abstractly, and form their own opinions. The latter evolution subsequently enables teens to begin to define their own life philosophy, along with thoughts on politics, and social issues. I’ve witnessed these changes in my own two daughters. Acknowledging and taking these evolutions in their thinking and views into consideration as we develop content enables us to truly engage with this high value audience. Whether late Gen Zers or early Gen Alphas, these digital natives are exposed to more information than any previous generation causing them to upage at a higher rate than ever before. While a torrent of mind-numbing content is being pushed to them by an algorithm, they actually want complexity and thought provoking content across their big and small screens.
These teens are also a significant part of the coveted co-viewing demographic, as they still enjoy watching series and films with either the whole family or teen and parent coming together for a shared quality-time experience. And, at this age, these kids are often the key decision makers in what to watch as families strive to continue to spend family-time with their budding teens. However, the challenge is finding something that they really want to watch. These young teens often agree to the latest animated film if they have younger siblings and become bored, or if the family dynamics age up become uncomfortable when the content skews too old.
The Kissing Booth ©Netflix | Superman & Lois ©WarnerMedia | CODA ©Apple | To All The Boys I Loved Before ©Netflix
A wonderful award winning and Oscar nominated film that spoke volumes to these teens is the teen-led family drama film CODA by Sian Heder on AppleTV. The writing was a gift that the actors brought to light in full color, the directorial choices by Sian were emotional and unexpected, telling the story through each character's experiences as she took us on a family’s heartwarming journey. The film is a real-world coming of age story delivered through a compassionate lens creating a memorable and relatable cinematic experience for teens and their families.
The same is true for Todd Helbing’s super series Superman and Lois within the superhero genre. The teen storylines are as prominent as the adult ones as Jordan, Superman’s son, becomes the heir apparent. Yet it's the storylines of all the teens, super and not, that grounds the series, making it relatable, wholesome and enjoyable for the whole family.
Other wonderful examples are the Netflix films To All The Boys I Loved Before written by Sofia Alvarez based on the books by Jenny Han, and The Kissing Booth film written by Vince Marcello, also based on a book of the same name by Beth Reekles. Both of which were so successful sequels were immediately ordered.
As a parent of teen girls, I’m inspired by this content and the wonderful co-viewing moments we shared with our daughters. At Very Big World Entertainment we see a huge opportunity, a white space for content development, for families with teens between 10 to 15 years old. We are focused on content with captivating teen storylines that have the increasing maturity of YA content; the engrossing worlds and depth of characters ... while ensuring our content is also emotionally appropriate for these amazing teens.
These teens have power and influence and the entertainment industry as a whole needs to respect their needs and give them content they love.
#Teens #ContentDevelopment #Tweens #CleanTeen #Entertainment