Relying on interns as a source of information about contemporary culture is a well known cheat in the corporate world. 

Here’s how they did it recently at Morgan Stanley, according to The Gawker.

Morgan Stanley has this 15 year-old intern in London, so while all these dudes were sitting around miserably trying to do analyst reports about youth media habits and shit, they realized they didn’t know shit about youth media habits, because they spend all their time in the office writing analyst reports, so they asked this intern kid, “Hey kid, why don’t you write a thing about your friend and how they use media and shit?”

Then they promptly forgot about it, because, I mean, kids, right? But then this kid comes back with this report and the analysts are like, “Holy fuck, we could totally sell this shit to other old people!” So now Morgan Stanley has published this kid’s note as a research report, and it is of course way more popular than whatever these pro guys have written this year.

References

Nolan, Hamilton.  2009.  Some Kid’s Media Mash Note is Hottest Thing on Wall Street.  Gawker.  July 13.  here.

McCracken, Grant.  2009.  Chief Culture Officer.  New York: Basic Books.  Forthcoming this fall.  Available for pre-order at Amazon.com here.

Acknowledgments

Thanks to Tim Sullivan for the head’s up.