Televisions, personal computers, mobile phones and games consoles: when it comes to entertainment platforms, kids have never had it so good.
However, despite the huge choice of media, broadcast TV remains at the heart of kids’ entertainment choices. Children aged five to 16 spend an average of 2.7 hours a day watching TV (broadcast and online viewing), compared to 1.5 hours using the internet and 1.3 hours playing their games consoles (source: ChildWise).
Mike Parker, Channel 4’s head of strategic sales and commercial marketing, believes kids are not watching less TV, but their TV and online activities are closely related, and they are increasingly comfortable moving between the two media.
Four out of five children aged five to 16 use some sort of on-demand viewing (rising to 92% of 11 to 16-year-olds), led by YouTube (63%), BBC iPlayer (28%), Virgin On Demand (18%), Sky+ (17%), 4oD (16%) and ITV.com (16%).
Parker says: "If you are targeting kids today, particularly older children, you have to plan across all platforms – one TV spot won’t cut it any longer." He adds that teen drama Skins is one of a handful of key shows, including Hollyoaks and The X Factor, where reach across video on-demand and +1 channels is dramatic.
Key shows aside, however, on-demand viewing is still tiny compared to broadcast television. Kelly Williams, sales director at Five, says 15,000 kids’ shows were streamed via Demand Five in September 2009, while more than 5.5 million individuals watched the Milkshake programming strand on the linear broadcast channel. He adds: "The broadcast stream is still the place for watching regular TV and online viewing is incremental."
Multiplatform brand
The Walt Disney Company, which developed its new ad-supported channel Disney XD as a multiplatform brand, is watching these developments closely. Disney provides content such as Aaron Stone and Zeke and Luther via Virgin and BT Vision on-demand services to ensure its boy-focused, girl-inclusive audience of kids aged six to 14 can access Disney XD wherever and whenever they want.
Michael Ghosh, UK director of advertising sales and promotions, says: "Our core audience is the first generation to grow up surrounded by technology. With all this technology at their fingertips, when you give kids content they love, they will follow it wherever you put it."
Carat’s media director Adrian English, who manages the Mattel account, believes advertisers must respond to the challenge by shifting marketing spend to whichever multimedia platform kids are migrating to.
He says: "If children are surfing the net, we will have to do more than online display. We will also have to develop more communications solutions where we can create a dialogue between a brand and kids."
English cites Mattel’s ongoing Formula Hot Wheels campaign on Cartoon Network as a good example. Carat has created a website for the toy car brand alongside programming that encourages children to play games online, aired on Cartoon Network. He says: "This is a far better alternative to just sticking an ad in front of a six-year-old and expecting it to have an impact."
Simon Cox, vice-president of Turner Media Innovations, agrees that interacting with kids while they play games online is a smart move for advertisers, especially when the games feature kids’ favourite TV characters. He claims websites such as cartoonnetwork.co.uk and nickjr.co.uk enable advertisers to engage with kids in an in-depth way for lengthy periods of time.
Cox says: "When we launch a new property, we say: ‘Hey kids, go and play the great Ben 10 game.’ We then wrap the advertiser around the ad-funded game, which is supplied free to kids. We know kids play ad-funded games for an average of 12 to 15 minutes each time. There is a huge amount of brand integration, and if you include a prompt to go to retail, then you have a very interesting proposition for brands."
Call to action
Bobi Carley, director of kids at Viacom Brand Solutions, says the best way for brands to achieve cut-through is by using strong creative with a call-to-action for the kids to engage with. For example, a Lego campaign that ran on Nickelodeon last year used a 10-second spot to invite kids to take part in an online competition to demonstrate why they are the brand’s biggest fan.
Four finalists then starred in a 10-second spot that encouraged kids to vote online on who should star in a Lego City TV commercial, to be aired on Nickelodeon. The competition attracted almost 14,000 entries over three months, and led to a 21% increase in ownership of Lego City over the course of the campaign.
Channel 4 and Five believe on-demand services offer further opportunities for advertisers, such as pre-roll and mid-roll ads. Five’s Williams says film studios are leading the drive to exploit these opportunities, such as Disney’s major cross-media deal to promote its new Pixar release Up.
Disney sponsored the movie Monsters Inc on Five, complementing this activity with pre-roll ads across Demand Five and the Milkshake website. While it is too early to gauge results, Williams reports one early outcome is a very happy client.
Meanwhile, many VBS kids campaigns incorporate a parental click-to-buy option, and there is an increasing opportunity for similar transactions via the television.
Agostino di Falco, vice-president and director of insight and planning at VBS, points to a joint initiative between Yahoo and manufacturer Samsung where internet-enabled TV sets feature a Yahoo widget bar that allows viewers to access websites via the television.
He explains: "Companies such as eBay and Amazon can buy space on the widget, and consumers – who may already hold an account with those companies on the internet – can have the widgets on their TV screen. When people see something they want, they can press the widget bar, go through to the appropriate supplier and buy straight away."
Di Falco believes the Yahoo widget is an interesting development, although parents may not welcome its pester power possibilities.
He adds: "This kind of thing breaks through the barrier of complexity; technically, you don’t even need a TV with a set-top box connected to it. We will start to see many more direct transactional opportunities because more and more expenditure is taking place in the home."
Best foot forward: Skechers lets kids choose their heroes
Skechers wanted to promote its range of kids’ footwear, where each shoe is linked to a superhero character such as Super Z-Strap and Elastika.
The TV campaign, which ran from March to September, aimed to build awareness and create a dialogue with a hard-to-reach audience whose media consumption typically includes TV, online and mobile.
Andy Swan, communications director at Skechers’ agency Mediaedge:cia, says a major goal of the campaign was to give kids back a feeling of control.
His team worked with Turner Media Innovations to bring the Skechers superhero characters to life so viewers could get to know them better. Viewers could then use their chosen hero to tell Cartoon Network which shows to broadcast.
Cartoon Network launched a special two-hour weekly slot on the channel called Skechers Select, which aired at 6pm each Friday. Each superhero character was matched to a suitable Cartoon Network show, such as Ben 10 or Johnny Test.
During the week, a series of spots aired on Cartoon Network urging kids to go online and use their chosen Skechers hero to vote for the programme they wanted to watch on Friday. Each week, two Skechers superheroes were pitted against each other, effectively giving the audience two shows to choose from.
Once kids arrived at www.cartoonnetwork.co.uk, a Skechers microsite invited them to click on their preferred Skechers superhero and then click on the ‘You select’ function to choose which of the two Cartoon Network shows would air.
Around the Friday night Skechers Select broadcast slot, Skechers ran sponsorship idents that carried the words: Brought to you by Skechers Select and [for example] Elastika.
The campaign reached 30% of kids aged four to nine, generating 200,000 unique users to the miscrosite (350,000 page views) and more than 4,000 entries to the competition.
Skechers was unable to reveal sales figures for the campaign, but Swan says: "The client was excited by the link between TV and online and letting kids choose the programmes."