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frontline: merchants of cool: interviews: brian graden | PBS

frontline: merchants of cool: interviews: brian graden | PBS: "Brian Graden is President of MTV Programming.

How much effort and resources do you put behind market research?
We put an immense amount of resources behind market research. But it's a little bit nontraditional. It's not just a bunch of quantitative data, which I think is relatively useless. We do a lot more from the point of view of what it's like to be 19 or 21 years old. We'll do focus groups where we'll bring 12 trend-setting kids together to talk about things over coffee, or other
qualitative exercises like this to find out, what are the emergent trends?

What do they think is cool? What are the forces that shape them?

Why?
The implicit promise of MTV has always been that we see things honestly from your POV. And we're not trying to necessarily be adults who program to somebody who's 19. But we're trying to be a service that exists as an honest reflection of your world, and that's our covenant. Remembering back to when you were 19, anybody talking to you from the vantage point of a 40-year-old, you just don't hear the same way. So I think that's the main reason, from the business point of view. And then, just from the sociological point of view, I think it's really important that that voice be reflected honestly somewhere on the media spectrum.
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