Strollerderby : marketing to kids

Hannah Montana's Gone Fruity

JeanneSager — Sun, 03 May 2009 16:16:00 GMT

I'm all for a brand using its sway with kids for good, but do we really need Hannah Montana bananas?

What about Mickey Mouse apples? High School Musical avocados?

Disney has gotten healthy to face the childhood obesity crisis head on, cutting ties with McDonald's (you'll notice there are no Disneyfied happy meals on your summer road trip this year) and slapping giant mouse ears on good, wholesome fare.

So, is it working? According to a look by the Washington Post, yes. When supermarket chain Winn-Dixie linked its bagged apples to High School Musical, sales spiked by forty-seven percent. The Disney Garden line is now appearing in eighteen of the top twenty mass and grocery retailers in the states, and sales grew seventy percent from 2007 to 2008.

I can admit I've fallen victim. My daughter needed a grab and go snack, and she saw Mickey apple slices on the shelves. She asked because they were Mickey. I bought because they were apples. With the same characters in a different aisle on sugar-packed "fruit" snacks, the real thing worked for me. We've also been known to pick up Princess soup because she begged for princesses, and my first introduction to Hannah Montana came in the supermarket when my daughter started shrieking about the pop star on her yogurt. Again, yogurt, much better than potato chips! Trust me - their branding is working on my impressionable three-year-old.

But I'm not sure how I feel about Disney selling health food to my kid. Is it better than peddling the junk? Sure. But does it have to be either or? I shy away from Sesame Street's organic pasta and breastfast offerings too, because as much as we all love Cookie Monster, he's not making me feel better about a processed box of waffles. And I'm not ready for the forecasted Mickey whole wheat chicken nuggets to replace the homemade version I make and freeze in my own kitchen.

Frankly, I'd prefer my kid make her food choices based on things like "amount of whole grains included" or "no trans-fats." I'd like to think she'd pick up an apple because we live in New York and have raised her on some of the nation's best apples, not because there's a cartoon character stamped on the flesh. Ditto avocados. They're fantastically flavorful and you can't have guacamole (yum) withouth them - so do we really need Zac Efron's mug to get them in my cart and on her plate?

Disney is such a powerful brand, I'm happy to see it inching back from the heart attack on a plate foodstuffs its traditionally backed. For parents who have had to measure just buying a requested item over the tantrum in the middle of the supermarket, it's definitely good news. Trust me, been there, heard the screeching. But I can't help wishing food would just go back to being food, no Hannah Montana, no Elmo, no Mickey. It's why I've fought the organic branding too.

Because in fifteen years, she won't be picking food because it has her favorite superhero printed on the front of the bag. She'll just have to go with her gut, and I'd like to think it's one filled with healthy choices.

Image: Washington Post

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Microsoft Says Computer's So Easy a Kid Can Do It

JeanneSager — Sun, 15 Feb 2009 17:53:00 GMT

It's supposed to answer all those Apple claims that PCs aren't user-friendly with the simple premise - Microsoft has made it so even a kid can do it. Does that mean the computers got easier or kids just got a whole lot smarter?

It doesn't become clear that the four-and-a-half-year-old taking a picture with a digital camera, uploading it, using editing software and e-mailing her shot off to her parents is an advertisement for Windows until the tail end. Considering they're signing middle aged folks up for college classes in how to use Facebook, maybe this is just the right approach. You might be completely computer illiterate, but your four-year-old can figure it out!

Except, parents - who, it can be argued, are more likely to tune in to commercials featuring kids - are more and more computer literate these days. At least the parents of kids whose ages fall in the range of the new Microsoft "rookies" commercial stars (four-and-a-half and seven). The nineties hinting that if you can't figure out your cell phone, you can always call your kid in to do it has been replaced - by those "kids" of the early nineties HAVING kids in the new millennium. Even so-called "older" parents are more likely to be computer literate; because while they were waiting to have children, they were working . . . in a corporate environment where computers are ubiquitous. I highly doubt President Obama called on Malia the first time he unleashed that Crackberry.

Of course kids in 2009 might be even more technologically savvy than their parents were as teens in the early nineties. Many of us wonder if our kids would recognize us without the glow of a computer screen forming a halo 'round our heads, and just yesterday my three-year-old grabbed the USB cord to my iPod and slipped it directly into the slot on the PC tower - no questions asked. Just like Microsoft's rookies, apparently she too is a PC.

If you've got a decent-enough handle on computer literacy, do you think your kids are gaining on you?

Image: Microsoft

Disney Takes Over the Egg Carton

SunnyChanel — Thu, 05 Feb 2009 02:05:00 GMT

The marketing maniacs at Disney are totally screwing with my weekly food shopping. I’ve been able to map my shopping trips, when the kid is in tow, to avoid most of the cartoon branded goods that are on the shelves, right at eye level, for kids to lust after. The cookie and cereal aisles are forbidden, as is the ice cream section and of course the “free Brach’s candy bins” that are always taunting little hands to go dip in and grab a hand full of gummy worms, carob covered raisins or the dreaded teeth destroyers, the hard caramels.

Now I have to be careful around the egg filled end cap, the mad branders at Disney have taken something a pure and simple as a chicken’s egg and made it into a branding opportunity. Each of the twelve eggs in the Mickey decorated box is stamped with a tiny stamp promoting one of their brands. The crew at Jezebel spied a commercial for eggs “during the 4th hour of Today” and it shows the eggs being cooked up into a perfectly fried pair of Mickey ears (see below). So not only will your children think that Disney can brand anything and everything, but that when you fry an egg it’ll end up looking just like the beauties in the commercial. Good luck with that.

Via; Jezebel

Miss Piggy Wants a Bailout For Christmas

Brett Singer — Wed, 17 Dec 2008 22:30:00 GMT

I'm going to backtrack now on something I said earlier. I was bemoaning (OK, fine, I was whining) that Disney, who now own the Muppets, were going to ruin what I feel are great characters, thereby destroying the possibility that future generations will derive pleasure from Kermit and Company.

Are you sitting down?

I may have been wrong.

Various Muppets appeared on The Today Show this morning to promote their new holiday special, 'A Muppets Christmas: Letters to Santa' (airing on NBC tonight at 8pm EST; Newsday gives it an A). (No, I don't mean to imply that Tom Cruise, who also was on this morning, is a Muppet. Although that would explain a lot.) The best part, in my opinion, was Miss Piggy, who as far as I know is still being played by the great Frank Oz.

It's not even that what she said was so hysterically funny. But the way that the hosts just sit and chat with her as if she were something other than felt never gets old to me.

Anyway, here are two clips from Miss Piggy's recent appearance, plus one from earlier this year where the Muppets took over the show and Miss Piggy tied up 'Law & Order' star Christopher Meloni with crime scene tape. Good times, good times.

Miss Piggy Wants a Bailout

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Miss Piggy on Today Show

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Older: Muppets Take Over Today Show

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Muppets Take Over the Today Show and Miss Piggy Ties Up Christopher Meloni

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

Hopefully these frequent Muppet appearances will get my kids interested in the characters once they outgrow Sesame Street. I grew up loving The Muppet Show, and enjoyed the same shows on DVD with my first son. (The second one doesn't seem interested yet.) With such a multitude of viewing choices out there, reminding us about the Muppets can't be a bad thing.

So there you go! I may have been wrong about Disney and their treatment of the Muppet property. Happy holidays, everyone.

(NOTE: Thank you to the commenter below who points out that the embeds of these videos aren't working. Go to MSNBC.com to find them.)

Source: MSNBC

Image: NYTimes

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They Say: Kids Escaping Advertising Blitz On the Net

JeanneSager — Wed, 29 Oct 2008 21:32:00 GMT

For kids, browsing the 'net is about content, not clutter. That's what a new report issued by the Nielsen company says. The company's online branch says sites visited by kids 2 to 11 has the "least advertising clutter," while sites for the greatest generation are chock full of ads.

Teens, who are highly considered to be among the most avid users of the internet and the ones parents are most worried about, are evidently exposed to only negligibly more than they're younger siblings. I assume they're referring to Facebook's relatively clean design (until those of us who are addicted to flair sully their walls . . . oh, someone save me from the love of the little buttons) and the fact that kids' individual Myspace pages are ad-free. But it would be interesting to know what they considering advertising.

The Noggin Website, pretty much the only place my daughter is ever allowed to go online, is as "ad-free" as the TV channel with the same name. But like the TV version, Noggin Online has promos for other Nickelodeon products. In the newspaper biz, we call those "house ads," but that's still advertising in my book.

The report doesn't detail how they came up with the numbers, only citing "niche" sites generally visited by adults are more likely to be cluttered with advertisments. Specifically, sites aimed at the 65 and up group are where advertisers are piling it on. So I guess the secret to keeping our kids safe from marketing is not to let them go on the Web with Grandma.

Image: Nick Halstead

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Disney trying to revive The Muppets

Brett Singer — Wed, 24 Sep 2008 19:30:00 GMT

I was going to title this post, "Disney doing everything they can to screw up the Muppets." But that was too long.

The New York Times reports on the fact that Disney is attempting to bring the Muppet "brand back from the dead," as "youth marketing expert" Samantha Skey puts it. ("Youth Marketing Expert" is code for "Spawn of Satan", but that's another topic.)

Eventually, odds are that the Disney Marketing Machine (another term that, loosely translated, means "Spawn of Satan") will succeed in cramming the classic characters down the gullets of children everywhere. This is the company that made Miley Ray Hannah Montana Stewart Cyrus Lipschitz (one of those names is fake – guess which!) one of the most successful stars of all time. They've even managed to convince kids that "High School Musical" is something other than awful. So the task of getting that audience to like something that is actually good shouldn't be too tough, right?

The thing is, despite our warm memories of all things Muppet, not every enterprise Kermit and Co. have been involved in has been a success, especially after Papa Henson passed away. "Muppets Tonight" (not mentioned in the Times article) was a flop, not because of bad marketing, but because the show wasn't very good. (I liked it a little bit, but mostly for nostalgia reasons.) And Disney has been trying to get the characters into the Disney machine for some time and so far it hasn't worked out.

Bottom line: since so many parents love them some Miss Piggy, once they see her, they'll want their kids to love her too. So if Disney can manage to put the Pig and her friends in places where both the parents and the kids can see them, they will probably succeed in getting a return on their investment. It doesn't take a marketing genius to figure that out.

Here's the thing about The Muppets. At their best, they are fully realized characters, despite the fact that they are not actually alive. Charles Grodin told a story once that went something like this: when he was filming "The Great Muppet Caper", he turned to Miss Piggy (played by Frank Oz) between takes. He told "her" that he wanted to try the upcoming scene a different way. After a long pause, Oz/Piggy replied (in character, while not being filmed), "Well, I don't really see it that way, but if you want to I guess we can try it." Why tell that story? Because that's what made the Muppets great. Not the green felt, or even Miss Piggy karate chopping anyone who had eyes for her beloved Kermie. It's the characters and the people who played them. To think that you can just pluck Fozzie Bear and the rest into another situation and assume that everyone will have the same positive feelings about them as before is kind of silly.

On a slightly different tack, does it bother you that Disney is taking these characters we grew up with and turning them into shills for generic Disney product?

Source/image: NYTimes

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It's Hard Out There for a Mom Who Says 'No'

Madeline Holler — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 18:57:00 GMT

Here's how the arguments go: I say how unregulated advertisement aimed directly at kids is contributing to childhood obesity rates among other societal ills. You remind me I'm the parent, I have the right to tell my kid "no," grow up, be the adult, how about a little personal responsibilty?

Here's the deal: I do say "no," all the time. Almost every time, truly. I've had a strict "no characters -- ever" policy, just so there were no gray areas. I even pass over the bargain clothes if they are emblazoned with Hannah Montana or Raven or Bratz or whatever. My seven-year-old knows this and mostly doesn't bother asking anymore.

Those times where there is a request for Sponge Bob this or Princess Whoever that, I set out the invisible lectern and launch into my diatribe on how this particular cereal is displayed just where they'll see it and the reason Johnny Depp is on a candy wrapper is so they'll want me to buy it. If the response is a whine, I go ahead and point out that Company X wants them to whine so I'll give up and I usually finish with "Your whining has strengthened my resolve! The answer now is especially 'no'!"

But damn. My resolve is growing weak. I'm really tired of it all. And I'm not convinced that all the no's now will result in them making better choices later. The thing is, personal responsibility/no regulation folks, parents are up against a lot. I'm pretty sure we're not winning either.

The Federal Trade Commission recognizes this too. They commissioned a study and found that the food industry spends $1.6 billion on all kinds of marketing to kids -- not just TV commericals, but those maddening grocery store displays and online brand interaction games and contests, school donations and more.

Here's some of what the study found (from AP via Salon):

The commission studied spending directed at children ages 2-17. Spending on soda marketing came to $492 million, with the vast majority of that spending directed toward adolescents. Fast food restaurants reported spending close to $294 million, which was divided about evenly between children and adolescents. For cereals, companies spent about $237 million, with the vast majority of that targeted to children under age 12.

Also, the Internet ads are completely unregulated and may differ from what is on TV and if you don't know exactly what you're kid is seeing online, well, then, the marketers have won. They always win.

Kathryn Montgomery, a communications professor at American University, said "Parents who are concerned abut their children's eating habits have to understand that you can't just look at what's happening on television. That's not the way it is anymore. It's a pervasive marketing environment."

Anyway, the FTC made some recommendations based on the report, including calling on marketers to use their money and ingenuity on promoting healthful foods and excercise in the same way they promote the other crap.

Personally, and here's where the initial argument begins again, I'd like to see tighter regulation of advertisements directed at children and strict limits on it as well. Un-American, I know. But my personal responsibility only gets me (and my kids) so far. You too, you know, you too.

How are you teaching your little ones to be media savvy? How do you keep from giving up?

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Happy Meals Flunk Out of School

Madeline Holler — Sat, 19 Jan 2008 16:39:00 GMT

On the one hand, I think it's great that a Florida McDonald's is withdrawing from a "Made the Grade" program, in which it rewarded Happy Meals to kids who got good grades. On the other hand, why was this going on at the school in the first place? The decision to end the program came all the way from the executives at corporate headquarters half-way across the country -- not the school leaders.

In a nutshell, here's what happened: a parent saw the jacket of her child's report card had the McDonald's golden arches, the "Made the Grade" program details and menu items like McNuggets printed on it. She complained to an activist organization that opposes marketing directly to children at schools. Under pressure, McDonald's agreed to end the program and pay for reprinting the report cards.

The decision was made “because we believe the focus should be on the importance of a good education,” William Whitman, senior director for communications and public affairs at McDonald’s USA in Oak Brook, Ill., said Thursday. “McDonald’s, not the school district, will cover the cost to reprint the report-card jackets,” he added, and “remove our trademarks.”

That's great that McDonald's took responsibility in ending this practice, particularly after recent promises to cut back on advertising to children. But still, the school leaders who entered in to the "Made the Grade" arrangement have some responsibility here too. They're the ones who offered up the kids to be marketed to (in exchange for much-needed money, I'm sure. Still.)

Here's what the organization that fought to end this sponsorship said:

“In the absence of needed government regulation to protect schoolchildren from predatory companies like McDonald’s,” she added, “the burden is on parents to be vigilant about exploitative marketing aimed at children.”

Sad but true.

I'm no junk food purist -- we stop at McDonald's plenty on long car trips. Sometimes, there's no other option. (And who doesn't love a fat, blisteringly hot bag of those fries? Those fries!) But I don't like rewards for grades for sure (topic for a different post). And I especially don't like advertising in schools. There, I am a purist. If corporations want to help schools, they can make a large donation without anything in return -- no naming rights, no nothing. Just give the schools the money and feel good. But they don't get to come in and have their logos and tastes and smells and smiling happy clowns and gushing, awesome candies and cool refreshing drinks become a part of kids' daily lives without a fight from those who have their best interests in mind: the parents and schools (or so I thought).

What do you think? A free meal's a free meal?

Why Tweens are Too Young for a Brazilian Wax

Madeline Holler — Wed, 16 Jan 2008 21:34:00 GMT

Jeez, I can think of a million reasons, the first of which: is there anything to wax?

The other 999,999 reasons … come on. I know we’re sexualizing girls at younger and younger ages, but 10? Waxing her pubes?

Apparently, you're never too young for this Australian website, read by girls aged 9 to 14. In an article about Brazilian waxing, they try hard to make the case:

So why does it appeal. Nobody really likes hair in their private regions and this removes it.

In another article (yes, more than one on the site), there's this description of what exactly happens. The good news is, I feel like this might deter all but the most goaded young kids.

Wax is smeared onto the mons, the cloth is pressed into place...then they turn the music up loud...rrripppp. It's quite normal for the waxer to throw your legs over their shoulder, or ask you to moon them so they can get the strays. The waxer then goes over your red bits with a pair of tweezers to pluck out recalcitrant strands.

Why does “pluck out recalcitrant strands” make me cross my legs?

One Australian writer, appalled by the notion that some celebrate getting rid of the just-grown hairs of adolescence, gives us a rundown of how things are going in the land of kiddie hair removal. (And you say marketers aren't savvy.)

As a cosmetic pharmaceutical company, Nair is obliged to reinvent normal bodily functions as problems with handy product solutions. And the Australian arm of the company has claimed its target audience is slightly older, in an attempt to distance itself from the US campaign, which involves phrases such as "Pretty isn't a look. It's a feeling," "Nair will leave your skin smooth and totally touchable!" and this pearler from Stacey Feldman, vice-president for marketing at Nair's parent company, Church & Dwight: "When a girl removes hair for the first time, it's a life-changing moment."

Life-changing, indeed! Now, about teaching girls the proper names for body parts, better add “mons” to the list so the little tykes know exactly what they're getting in to.

Does Pooping While Playing Count as Multi-Tasking for Kids?

Jessica Ashley (Sassafrass) — Fri, 20 Apr 2007 17:04:00 GMT

When it comes to focus, I admit, I am not the best mama role model. I can't get through an episode of American Idol without IMing and I even (gasp) get up every few minutes from Play-Do to refresh the old in-box. I need the radio on while I drive and motherhood has made a master at putting on make-up while wiping a tush and talking on the phone to my single friends who actually wait for their mascara to dry in between coats. We all know that if we did one thing at a time, our kids would never get to school, we'd never answer work emails and we would really never see the outside world.

So is all this multi-tasking modeling the reason our tots are engaging in several activities at once, causing marketers to the mini-set to pump their fists and awkardly slap high-fives across cubicles? Are our kids natural over-stimulators or is multi-tasking a new skill set for the toddlers on up?

A report to media folk reveals that kids two to ten spend 25% of their time engaged in two or more activities at one time, justifying massive cross-platform marketing to kids into their tweens. Whether it will make your kid the greatest Dora consumer of all time or a highly successful VP of some type-A corporation, your precious child's ability to build and knock down a massive Lego tower while simultaneously filling his diaper without flinching shows mad skills. And maybe, you can pat yourself on the back for that.

Strollerderby : marketing to kids

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