Write a story about your friends and Morgan Stanley will publish it

In one of the more bizarre things seen in recent times Morgan Stanley has published a research note which consists entirely of a story written by a 15 year old intern about his friends.

The report is said to have become a huge talking point in the UK with Morgan Stanley’s CEO telling FT.com that “We’ve had dozens and dozens of fund managers, and several CEOs, e-mailing and calling all day” and that he estimated that the note had generated five or six times more feedback than the team’s usual reports.

The problem though is that the report is complete bollocks and even Morgan Stanely admits it; the introductory note states that the report isn’t “claiming representation or statistical accuracy” and that the report is based on asking the author to “describe how he and his friends use media.”

My friends like to drink red wine, ipso facto red wine is more popular than beer among 30-40 year olds living in Australia…ok, I digress, but the methodology I just used is the exact methodology used in the report.

The content of the report varies between gross generalizations based on publicly available data sets, and conclusions that heavily highlight the complete lack of respondents in the study. Take for example the section on Twitter:

On the other hand, teenagers don’t use Twitter. Most have signed up to the service, but just leave it because they’re not going to update it (mostly because texting Twitter uses up credit, and they would rather text friends with that credit.) In addition they realize that no one is viewing their profile, so their “tweets” are pointless.

Where do you start with that? Around 11% of Twitter users in the United States are aged between 12-17 suggesting that “teenagers don’t use Twitter” is blatantly false: what the report should have said is that the author and his mates don’t use Twitter. The texting thing is bizarre in a report that details the popularity of devices such as the iPhone: data is the key driver of iPhone usage, so they’d be more likely accessing twitter online than via txt. No one is viewing their profile? WTF? The author doesn’t even know how Twitter works: you don’t view a “profile” page but instead a stream of tweets from multiple people.

I could write a post 5,000 words long pulling apart this report, but I won’t. The embed of the report below. We all know how much strife the big banks were in last year, and it would appear that things haven’t really improved all that much if Morgan Stanely is publishing rubbish like this.

How Teenagers Consume Media

Embed via Mashable.