Tripping Out
Man, field trips have changed since I was in high school. This spring, 174 kids in Minnesota spent a weekend at the Radisson to discuss marketing strategy, and Monday at the state capital lobbying to save a $6.4 million ad campaign. They’re the Advisory Council for Target Market, the state’s youth anti-tobacco campaign.
Legislators had been wrangling over the state’s $590 million tobacco settlement endowment and Target Market’s funding hung in the balance. Things got dicey when Rep. Kevin Goodno passed out lyrics sung at a Target Market gig last fall: “I need a beer to wash it all away without a trace. And then I’ll drink 23 more to wipe this stupid smile off my [expletive] face.”
That’s the thing about being cool to the bone: If it isn’t one risky behavior, it’s another.
Punk band Alkaline Trio sang it at the October Kick Ash Bash — three days of bands, seminars (Manipulation 101, Underground Film), door prizes, and Big Tobacco bashing. Four hundred kids trekked to St. Cloud for this second Bash to be hard-ass, rockin’ rebellious — and smoke-free.
These forays are expressly not set up for “goody-goody student council types,” as one state official calls them. Those kids apparently are too self-assured, too preachy, too convinced already that they shouldn’t smoke.
In my day, we called those kids the Homecoming Court. They had great hair, looked comfortable in their Prom tuxes, and secretly smoked when they drank on the weekends.
No, Target Market summits are for “at risk” kids, the ones who don’t smoke — yet — but aren’t entirely convinced that a cigarette wouldn’t give them that je ne sais quoi that makes student council types seem so confident.
In my day, that would cover the Theater People, the Swim Team (unrelenting potheads who got away with it because their eyes were always red anyway), the Band, maybe the Jocks, and the rest of us teeming masses too indistinct to merit a nickname. It would not cover the Freaks, those kids who blatantly smoked in public and hung out in The Corral, a blacktopped square outside the nurse’s office that was our school’s officially sanctioned smoking zone. Imagine a high school today with an officially sanctioned smoking zone.
No, the Freaks would be a distinct market segment requiring a radically different strategy. For them, the tagline would have to verge on preaching “Don’t Smoke.” That is a philosophical universe away from Target Market’s positioning: “They target us. We target them.” Target Market pointedly doesn’t tell kids not to smoke — it just tells them, in achingly persuasive fashion, that Evil Tobacco Executives recruit teens to replace dead smokers. Most of the info comes from tobacco company documents now owned by the state — internal memos that debate the value of cherry- or honey-flavored cigarettes, that kind of thing.
Despite the questionable soundtrack, Target Market’s field trips give kids a chance to be cool without cigarettes. Manipulation 101 gives them a mantra, and the attendee badge is the prop that causes confidence without causing cancer. It’s all one psychologically sophisticated weekend away from home.
The most elaborate field trip I remember from high school was a bus ride to the Indiana Dunes with Mr. Paxton’s biology class. We studied humus, bird tracks, and native grasses; we climbed the shifting sands of Mt. Baldy and slid back down on our butts. I told my mom that part and she glowered, “Don’t talk like an alley cat!” because I said the word “butt.” Sheesh.
Field trips may still be about trashing butts, but the political correctness has a whole new tone.
