It isn’t a 15 year old’s report that shows the banks to be out of touch; it is their cheap publicity stunt.

It all began, we are told, when fifteen year old Matthew Robson was asked to write a report on teenagers’ likes and dislikes as part of an internship at Morgan Stanley. Robson (being a teenager and therefore obviously obsessed with online media, presumably) set about arguing that teenagers aren’t particularly keen on paying for music they can download for free, or wasting their phone credit on ‘tweets’ that are essentially not really worth the money; money which is instead being spent on video games, concerts and cinema trips. The report goes onto claim that teenagers are shunning newspapers in favour of easily consumed television news, and rejecting websites littered with adverts in favour of those free from pop-ups.

Needless to say the report, although engaging with several points of interest in current media, is not particularly ground-breaking; unless, of course, you work for Morgan Stanley’s European media team, in which case you apparently found this “one of the clearest and most thought-provoking insights we have seen.” The story ran on the front page of the Financial Times, which claimed Robson’s report became a “city sensation”, offering a damning verdict on twitter just as media moguls were discussion the progression of online media at the Allen & Co conference. Edward Hill-Wood, head of the European media team, claimed Robson’s work had resulted in dozens of feedback from media executives and had earned a far bigger response than of the company’s usual reports.

If this claim about feedback seems rather ambiguous and not particular revealing, the feedback from online bloggers tells a different story. As the story spread to other newspapers, the response from the masses was more damning: “Do they really think the opinions of one fifteen year old represents all fifteen year olds?”, “It’s amazing that they need a fifteen year old to explain that to them” and “I would strongly recommend Morgan Stanley gets itself a decent media and online PR agency” are just three from the Guardian’s coverage. So, should we really believe that Morgan Stanley deems the voice of one fifteen year old an appropriate sample? Are we really to accept that it took a teenage intern to point out seemingly obvious trends in the use of online media?

Well, if you have any sense, the answer to both should surely be no. Illegal downloading has been a central topic of discussion over the last few years, and numerous have reports have found teenagers to be big offenders; to accept the investment bank to be blind to this fact is extremely foolish. Aside from this, Morgan Stanley doubtless have a huge team of expert researches, with far more statistics available to it than Robson’s report used (including newspapers sales, music website subscriptions, etc.) making it even more unlikely that they would overlook blatant trends.

Because of this, it looks increasingly like we are not the witnesses to a revolutionary report from an adolescent expert, but the targets of a rather cheap publicity stunt. This is an attempt by an investment bank to portray itself as engaged with not just teenagers, but the masses; Morgan Stanley will listen to our verdict on online media, and will act in accordance with our desires. It will shun its experts, seemingly falling over their own incompetence, delivering the superior advice of 'one of the people' to all the city's elite.

The real victim, though, is Matthew Robson himself, currently being attacked on blogs and news sites for his (both) statistically questionable and unoriginal report; no doubt Robson too never considered his report pioneering, before he became the pawn in a publicity stunt executed by Morgan Stanley.