Young people today are under a lot of pressure and expectance to perform youth as advertising designs and requires it to be. This performance is highly regulated and maintained by a number of powerful ideological systems of control and authority. It is important to make the distinction between youth used as an age group to sell to, and youth used as a concept and commodity fetish to sell to a mass audience. Although these uses of "youth" are tied very closely to one another, their effect is felt differently. Ewan's thesis that advertising played an integral role in post-industrial youth seeing themselves as consumers of commodity goods instead of producers of their own livelihood, is an excellent touchstone to gauge how far contemporary consumer youth culture has become removed from underground youth subculture. Goodman and Dretzin punctuate this point in The Merchants of Cool. They submit the proposition that youth are subject to ideological boundaries and command, and are regulated to the satisfaction of identity through commodity fetishism. Selling to the youth age group is a complex set of management techniques involving the institution of the category youth or teenager, the organization of sexual, spatial and social difference, and the intense observation of subculture. Youth subculture is always in opposition to dominant culture and the corporation uses this to its own benefit, to sell commodity goods. Selling of the concept "youth" is an elaborate system of ideology, which entails the organization and commodification of trendy and underground culture. Efficiency, effectiveness and bottom line profit appear to be the aim of advertisers when it comes to youth in promotional culture. However, it is a never-ending cycle. The subculture source of "cool" is not the same population of youth to whom the engineered products are targeted. Advertisers look to the very teenagers they are attempting to sell to for inspiration for their next marketing scheme to sell to the masses. After all, it is with the young people that coolness evolves.
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