Kid Nation
Thursday, June 12 2008
It started off innocently enough - Cap 'N Crunch commercials during Saturday morning cartoons back in the 70's - but set off a wave of spending in my house on sugary breakfast cereals that was exactly what their marketers had in mind. Of course in today's world, running ads for kids during cartoons on Saturday morning without a grown-up within earshot nonetheless influences some very grown-up spending levels on everything from breakfast cereals and video games to Disneyland vacations and Hummer SUVs. Psychologists have long-argued the ethics of marketing to kids, whose innocence and vulnerability seem to have had no effect whatsoever on the very grown-up, no-holds-barred world of consumer retail. What's interesting here is the convergence of two worlds: marketer interaction with kids, and kid interaction with the Web.
Let's start with marketer interaction with kids.
This is not a new phenomenon, just a growing one. Even in the 60's, kids under 14 influenced some $5 billion of spending by their parents. In the 70's, it was $20 billion, in the 80's it was $50 billion, the 90's approached $200 billion (source here). For an estimate of today's kid-influence on consumer spending, look no further than the media kit for TIME Magazine's kid version, appropriately named, 'TIME for Kids.' See here. They estimate that kids under 13 influence some $600 billion in family spending. What's surprising here is not just the scope and scale of the spending influence, but the tone of the media kit, which gleefully celebrates the opportunity to market to grade-schoolers with nuggets like these:
- The superhero strength of the kid consumer
- The kids in TIME For Kids®: Lucrative, influential consumers
- Kids boast their own considerable purchasing power—and it's growing by leaps and bounds!
- Kids have a strong influence on parents' buying decisions, even at a young age
- They're the adult consumers of the future
The marketing influence on kids is pretty well-understood. More importantly, the payoff of interaction with kids through targeted marketing is well-understood, if you believe these influenced-spending statistics. There are countless sources for this sort of info, and they all say pretty much the same thing.
Next let's talk about kid interaction with the Web.
I'll blame my fascination with online kid-communities like Webkinz and Club Penguin on my own kids, who have given me more than a few demos on our PC at home. The two sites are slightly different, in that Webkinz requires you to buy a $12 toy the old-fashioned way to get access to cool parts of the site, while Club Penguin wastes no time and asks your kid for a credit card number to bankroll a $5.95 per month subscription to the site (which, for the record, I will not do). It was surprising enough to see the comScore Media Metrix numbers on these sites: Club Penguin has 4.7 million unique kid users per month (up from 1.9M a year ago), and Webkinz has 6 million uniques, up from less than a million a year ago. You can find all of this in a NYT article here. But the topper was Google's recent announcement on the Web's fastest-growing search terms:
- Webkinz no. 2
- Club Penguin no. 6
Full list here. It's worth noting that MySpace and Facebook are trailing the kid sites on this list. In fact, there are a bunch of virtual worlds for kids that are putting up some big numbers: Gaia, 2.5M UUs; Neopets, 4.2M; Millsberry, 2.2M (near & dear to my heart, this one is run by sugary-cereal king General Mills). Other figures about Web usage among kids simply rounds out a picture we can all plainly see - for a vast array of consumer products, the move is on to stake out kid destinations on the Web.
These two worlds come together as marketing and advertising dollars shift to the Web, right alongside the kids who are spending more and more of their time there. The inevitable conclusion is that the targeting of kids though an endless slew of Web-based marketing activities will become more and more lucrative. Even Webkinz-owner Ganz is finding ad-based opportunities to better monetize the Webkinz.com phenomenon, although placement of ads on the previously ad-free site has created somewhat of a backlash for the privately-held company. See here.
Online kid communities will continue to fuel the ethical debate about children as influencers of consumer spending, while watchdog groups like the Better Business Bureau's Children's Advertising Review Unit and the Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood continue to cry foul (and with good reason), but unfortunately none of it will matter in the end: any sense of what's ethical or reasonable will be simply overwhelmed by economic forces and profit motives that don't discriminate based on age. When a world that markets to kids collides with a world of kids on the Web, there is some serious money to be made, and I mean that in the most alarmist sense possible.
