In an increasingly digital society, there are few brands that provide genuinely inclusive experiences for teenagers to hang out in person. Cheryl Calverley & Paul Billingsley, leaders of the #IRLrevolution and founders of THE DEN, share their clarion call for inspiring, safe places for teenagers to socialise IRL.
Ah. We adults. We experienced, wise people who’ve lived a lifetime in society, navigated work, relationships, challenge and opportunity. Whether we admit it or not, we all like to think we know what good looks like. We think we know what’s right, and what young people need to thrive in this world. As a result, we often have a patronising, borderline condescending, and certainly subjective view of what young people need. More skills. More education. To behave in a certain way. To experience certain things (and not others). More of everything we see as important, from our exalted position as adults who grew up in the 1990s and 2000s. But this generation is growing up in the 2020s. The challenges they face are very different. They are growing up in the world we made for them, not the one our parents made for us. And boy, have we eff’d it up.
We recently launched the #IRLrevolution – the fight to give every UK teenager somewhere to socialise in real life. It’s a revolution born of sheer frustration at the world we have created; desolate high streets, no funding for leisure and youth services, venture capital investment pouring hand-over-fist into tech solutions that drive us further and further away from a face-to-face society. It’s a society we built for our own benefit, with push-button-quick, entertainment-on-tap, hassle-free, last-days-of-Rome levels of indulgence. But in creating this digital society we have destroyed our high streets, our communities. Removed all the places where our teenagers hung out together. But we didn’t care, because teenagers aren’t important. They’re not ‘valuable consumers’, so businesses didn’t notice them. They’re not voters, so government didn’t hear them. They (apparently) don’t contribute to society, so our local communities didn’t miss them (and in many cases are glad to see them gone). So they’re alright, aren’t they? They’re alright with nowhere to go to be together? Living a facsimile of a social life through a glass screen? I mean, it’s not as if socializing is important for teenagers? It won’t contribute to the skills, the education, the behavioural development we all KNOW they need? Right?
Wrong. As a result of boxing 3.5m people up in their rooms, and making the only space they’re free to socialize a disembodied 16 x 8cm screen, we are carrying out the largest psychological experiment known to man. And I tell you, if this were a laboratory, we would be screaming STOP right now. Our research subjects, our young people, are suffering a mental health crisis on a scale never before seen. Rates of anxiety, depression and self-harm have all more than doubled since the widespread uptake of smartphones and the destruction of the high street. They are the loneliest generation on record.
So what can brands do to help? And who’s getting it right? The most important thing is to provide space where teenagers are genuinely free to be together and be themselves. Space where they are not looked at, frowned at, intimidated, moved along, unwanted, or discriminated against. A massive shout-out here to Nando’s, one of the places that creates spaces where teenagers are welcome alongside adults, and treated as valuable customers. They work intentionally to create a brand and experience that is genuinely inclusive, bringing young people into their community and creating an experience that works as hard for 15-year-olds on a Friday evening as for families on a Sunday afternoon and lads on a Saturday night out. In a similar vein, only fresher, is the phenomenon of Wingstop. Wingstop venues feel unlike any other, and are wholeheartedly targeted at young adults. But that’s done with proper respect. Respect in the incredibly high-quality food (if you’ve not had Wingstop voodoo fries, you’ve not LIVED), respect in the customer service and presentation (street-food done well), and respect in the communications and brand, with proper investment made in communications developed by young people, for young people. No monolithic advertising agency, complex brand strategy and ethnographic youth research to be seen here. Just young people, creating cool shit, for young people.
In the lifestyle space, props go to JD Sports. Partly it’s one of the few spaces left on the high street where teenagers can hang out and feel welcome. Partly it’s a brand that gets young people deeply – not least because, with stores largely staffed by young people, the insight and empathy in the customer experience is first-hand. And partly because it leans in so hard and so explicitly into youth on a CSR front, with the JD Foundation working day-in and day-out to support young people as they make that difficult transition into the world of work.
But we can’t ignore the elephant in the room: the people making the most money out of our teenagers today are Big Tech. And they’re doing irreparable harm. Are any of them counterbalancing this damage? Are there any redeeming features? A hard NO for pretty much all of them. But there is one exception, a tech platform that set out from day one to augment real life, rather than replace it. And that’s Snapchat. Now then, they’re not without their issues. We know the challenges with Snap streaks and dick pics, and so do they. But they are the only platform that in no way encourages self-esteem-destroying, judgment-inciting, one-to-many communication. The only platform that is about embracing the imperfections of real life and making it funnier, sillier, less self-conscious. Snap maps bring more teenagers together IRL every day than possibly any other invention on the planet. All built on an underlying commercial model that’s not reliant on converting ever more of our interactions into digital rather than physical ones. Watch this space, for Colleen DeCourcy is on a mission.
But none of this is good enough yet. None of this leans properly into intentionally creating businesses that do as much good as those that have done harm. We need a revolution. We need to give back to our teenagers what we never realized was our greatest privilege: spaces where we were free to be together doing nothing of ‘importance’. Time hanging around on our local high streets, in HMV, Topshop, Our Price, pool halls, youth clubs, snooker clubs, arcades, leisure centres, shopping centres, even (shock horror) underage in the back room of the pub.
The only way we can make it happen is if we raise our voices, and fight for inspiring, safe places for our teenagers to socialise IRL on high streets up and down the land. The spaces we had. And the spaces our teenagers deserve. Leaving the world better for the next generation is the only way to leave the next generation better for our world. It’s on us. So if this has struck a chord, if you are serious about making the lives of young people better, go to www.IRLrevolution.co.uk NOW and join the fight to give every UK teenager somewhere to socialise in real life.
