| 2001 News & Magazine
Articles
Call
it 'kid-fluence' Junior tells the parents what car
to buy; advertisers drool
By
Marci McDonald; Marianne Lavelle
U.S. News & World Report
07/30/2001
It's
commercial-break time on Nick Jr., the Nickelodeon
network's morningprogramming block for the preschool
set. An unaccustomed adult viewer braces for the usual:
rambunctious pitches for impossibly adorable dolls
and improbably colored food--green ketchup, blue applesauce,
and Rugrats-shaped macaroni. But the commercials unfolding
on the TV screen aren't for the kinds of kid fare
that routinely turn a trip to the mall or grocery
store into a whining, tear-stained bargaining process.
No, these ads look more like they might have mistakenly
strayed onto Nick Jr. from the nightly news or business
report.
One
laconic spot for Ford's Windstar shows a band of youngsters
playing hide-and-seek around a minivan. Another lyricizes
over the virtues of Huggies diapers, and a third is
a lilting invitation to a family getaway in the Bahamas.
This is the new world of children's television, where
the shows may still be aimed at the under-5 crowd,
but the ads increasingly target the adults curled
up on the couch beside them. "A couple of years
ago, you would only have seen advertising directed
at kids--toys, games, and cereals," says James
Perry, Nickelodeon's vice president of sales. "But
in the 9 a.m.-to- 2 p.m. block for preschoolers, we
found it's one of the purest places on television
for advertisers to reach moms, too."
"Nag
factor." One result is that everybody from carmakers
to corporate healthcare providers is clambering aboard
the kids- marketing bandwagon. And why not? According
to James McNeal, a retired professor from Texas A&M
University who is considered the godfather of kids
marketing, children ages 4 to 12 last year spent $29
billion of their own money--from allowances, baby-sitting
fees, and handouts their parents doled out on trips
to the mall. But McNeal argues that those youngsters
also had a direct influence on an estimated $290 billion
in family spending in 2000. "That's kids actually
pointing fingers and making demands," McNeal
notes. Playing on what psychologists call "the
nag factor," 2-to-12-year-olds had an indirect
impact on another $320 billion of household purchases,
he says. "The real story of kids' market power,"
agrees John Geraci, vice president of youth research
at Harris Interactive, "is not their spending.
It's their influence on the household." In response,
companies that have never given the slightest thought
to an audience they once scorned as ankle biters are
retailoring their messages for the kindergarten crowd
and their adult "co- viewers," be they parents
or nannies. In the past year and a half, Nickelodeon
has struck deals with such first-time advertisers
as Gateway--which now turns out Rugrats and Blue's
Clues editions of its Astro computer--and Ford Windstar,
whose official spokespuppy is the popular, azure-colored,
canine star of Blue's Clues. And in May, as part of
a three-year, $20 million pact, Embassy Suites Hotels
began offering every family that checks in this summer
a "Nick Trip Pack" with a disposable camera,
travel journal, and a Rugrats "Tommy" doll.
In the month and a half since that Nickelodeon promotion
began, visits directly tied to the ads have boosted
weekend bookings by 34 percent over last year.
Armed
with statistics like that, Perry is crisscrossing
the country, trying to sign up other nontraditional
advertisers for Nickelodeon's fall lineup. And the
network now boasts a separate marketing division devoted
to clients who've never ventured into the kinder market.
"This is a huge development," he says, "and
people are only beginning to grasp the concept."
Nickelodeon
is not the only network promoting the notion of what
some researchers term "generationally convergent
marketing"--better known as using kids to win
the hearts and wallets of adults. Three years ago,
PBS approached CIGNA, one of the country's largest
employee-benefit providers, to sponsor The Adventures
From the Book of Virtues, an animated series based
on the bestseller by former Education Secretary William
Bennett. The proposal stunned executives who had spent
years marketing directly to their clients: the corporate
decision makers who choose among insurers. "At
first, our CEO said, `What? A cartoon show?' "
recalled Ed Faruolo, CIGNA's vice president of corporate
marketing, at a conference last fall. But three seasons
and hundreds of thank-you notes from parents later,
internal studies showed that adults who'd watched
the series had a more favorable view of CIGNA than
those who had not.
For
critics of the mushrooming children's marketing industry,
the rush of new advertisers into traditional kidspace
is hardly good news. Last year, the Kaiser Family
Foundation estimated that the average American child
is exposed to 40 hours a week of commercial messages
on everything from computer screens to roadside billboards--
as much time as many of their parents spend on the
job.
Some
activists, like Eric Brown of the Maryland-based Center
for a New American Dream, have long counseled parents
to watch TV with their youngest kids as a safety check.
But now they see the networks' attempt to cash in
on that "co-viewing" as an exercise in cynicism:
Parents' efforts to protect their offspring from premature
consumerism have become yet another sales opportunity.
Other
critics such as Alvin Poussaint, a professor of psychiatry
at Harvard Medical School, are calling on Congress
to explore the possibility of adopting laws like those
in Sweden and the Canadian province of Quebec, which
ban advertising to children under 12. But a handful
of U.S. media conglomerates, including Disney, have
dispatched lobbyists to make sure Sweden's example
doesn't spread in Europe. Marketers on this side of
the Atlantic seem unfazed by the prospect of such
legislative threats. "It doesn't seem to be on
the landscape in this country at all," says Mike
Burns, who oversees Saatchi & Saatchi's Kid Connection,
the world's largest ad agency devoted to children.
Burns
and other kids marketers view the explosion in their
industry as a testimonial to the phenomenon of "kid-fluence"--the
growing clout that children wield in deciding household
purchases. "Over the last five years, there's
been a substantial increase in the amount of influence
kids have on durable goods--cars, boats, big- ticket
items," Texas A&M's McNeal says."The
power in the household is being ceded to the children."
One
reason is the time pressures on single parents or
two-career couples. "It's the guilt factor,"
says Karen Olshan, director of strategic operations
for BBDO New York. "With many split families
in this country, kids really become partners with
adults in making decisions." Agrees Nickelodeon's
Perry: "It's a sad but true reality- -for working
parents, a lot of quality time with the kids means
going shopping."
In
search of cool. Others blame kids' mounting influence
on the fact that their baby boomer parents refuse
to become the kind of stick-in-the-muds they feel
their own parents were. Decked out in the same Gap
duds as their offspring, many confer regularly with
the younger set on how to stay cool."The generation
gap doesn't exist anymore," says J. Walker Smith,
president of Yankelovich Partners. "Nowadays,
mothers consult their daughters on what cosmetics
to buy. And if you want to sell a car to a dad, you
advertise to his teenage son."
In
today's families, many kids also serve as chief technology
officers. When it comes to computers and other electronic
purchases, even 7-year-olds may boast more expertise
than Mom or Pop. A 1999 survey by Yankelovich found
that 60 percent of parents don't shop for technology
without consulting their kids. "Kids tend to
be information gateways," says Olshan. "And
parents can't help but listen when the kids know more
than you do."
In
families of recent immigrants, grade schoolers often
find themselves playing an even more essential role:
cultural interpreter and all-around consumer guide.
Isabel Valdes, a top researcher on Hispanic marketing
who has lived in California for some two decades,
admits that she owes many of her early insights to
her own toddlers. "When I immigrated here from
Chile, my kids pushed us to have cereal for breakfast,"
she says. "At home, nobody had ever heard of
cereal."
But
even a kid-savvy expert like Nickelodeon's Perry was
stunned by two studies that documented the full extent
of kids' consumer clout. One showed that 65 percent
of kids ages 9 to 11 had specific likes and dislikes
in hotels, and 56 percent believed their families
paid attention to their vacation wish list.
The
other report, by automotive researchers J. D. Power
& Associates, found that 54 percent to 63 percent
of parents acknowledged their kids had been actively
involved in shopping for a sport utility vehicle or
minivan--and the greatest input appeared to come from
6-to-8-year-olds. Perry promptly called Jim Townsend,
brand manager for Ford's Windstar, and proposed targeting
an audience well below carmakers' radar--the preschoolers
most frequently found in a minivan's back rows. "The
question," Townsend says,"was how young
do you go?"
Late
last year, Windstar became the exclusive sponsor of
Blue's Clues as part of a multimillion-dollar promotional
and safety campaign, which includes interactive Web
games and Blue's paw prints plastered at strategic
kid-friendly locations in the van. "In a showroom,
kids will run to the vehicle they like," Townsend
says. "And if they run to your vehicle, you know
you'll be sitting down to close the deal."
For
researchers like McNeal, the Ford campaign to preschoolers
represents a triple-barreled play: Not only are the
ads reaching both kids and parents but they're also
imprinting the Ford brand on young psyches before
they get their driver's licenses. Townsend says it's
too early to measure the impact of the Nickelodeon
deal on sales. But he has seen the branding process
in the flesh. In one focus group, he watched a 5-year-old
pick out all the pictures on a display that were icons
from the Blue's Clues show. Then, unprompted, she
picked up the blue oval Ford logo and added it to
the mix.
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