MTV's Provocative Investment: Stupid or Smart?

Unless you enjoy teen sex driven shows, you might not know about “Skins”. “Skins” is MTV’s latest late night show. The show is about sex-crazed teens and has a TV-MA rating. While TV-MA means teenagers are not suppose to watch, not many adults have an interest in teen sex lives – but other teens do. It’s pretty obvious the show about teens, not rated for teens, is going to be liked by teens. I haven’t watched the show but I did catch some news on the concerns about the show. I recently read “MTV’s Naked Calculation Gone Bad” by David Carr which talks about the ways the show has crossed the line.

It was previously reported by Brian Stelter in his article “A Racy Show With Teenagers Steps Back From a Boundary” that MTV executives had to question if the show which employs teen actors/actresses crossed the line into child pornography. Both Carr and Stelter reports MTV plans to edit out more scenes in order not to scare advertisers and the public from thinking they promoted such content. Taco Bell withdrew their advertising from the show but there hasn’t been a complete advertising boycott from the show. Carr reports that MTV had a great marketing plan for its show which resulted in 3.3 million viewers for the first episode. While many will say the show is a depiction of actual teen life or just crossing the line, the subject of his article is business ethics.

For one, did any one at MTV watch the premiere before its airing? It seems the scramble to ask the child pornography question came after the airing as if MTV was not prepared for what it saw. As defenders and creators of the show, they should have been prepared by understanding how their product would be perceived. The questionable accusation can not be a surprise. If any business is to cross over into the racy world of sexual content, they should understand any issues they can incur from such crossover.

Whether any one can agree on where the line exists, should business continue to try and cross that questionable line just for ratings? MTV is a channel which can draw from a multitude of subject matters to gain a large teen audience. They can also reengage their young adult (as in, over 18 years old) audience who practically made the channel reputable. Carr points out that the channel is attempting to move away from a dependence on reality shows in order to reinvigorate their scripted shows. Currently, MTV lives off of the “Jersey Shore”; balancing out reality with script is a good plan. But “Skins” should not have been MTV’s first attempt to make a scripted show comeback.

“Skins” is now attracting attention from being provocative, which cannot last for long. Also, the target market is teens. Teens follow and leave trends very quick; considering MTV will be scaling back the sexual content they will have to find something other than sex to attract teens. With other shows already using sex to attract teens, MTV has also welcomed competition.

This post is not about teen sex lives or racy content. MTV is not alone; many other networks create racy content for teens. MTV is an established network for young adults and teens. Everyone says sex sells but MTV can be creative enough not to follow that typical rule. They could have stood out and chosen a different way to attract a large teen audience. But they chose “Skins”.  I’ll end this post with a quote from Chris Macdonald, who was mentioned in the article.  He is a “visiting scholar at the University of Toronto’s Clarkson Center for Business Ethics and author of the Business Ethics Blog”.

“Teenagers are both sexual beings and highly impressionable, and because of that, they’re vulnerable to just these kinds of messages. You have to wonder if there isn’t a better way to make a living”