Check out this bit of kid/parental sharing. Can someone give me one compelling reason to act like an adult? The idea of play doesn’t stop when a Gen Xer or Yer becomes an adult, let alone a parent. Now it's about seeing the fun side of all things. Even when your house is being overrun by Littlest Pet Shop, as demonstrated by director Rebecca and her dad, the cameraman.
In fact they're so alright, they're the key to grown-up marketing.
Early reports on the ill health of the kids upfront have been greatly exaggerated, according to network ad sales executives, who hope to swap out Chicken Little projections of a flat to down market in favor of a more blustery Foghorn Leghorn outlook.
"Synergies between TV and digital are very strong," says Brad Davis, vp, ad sales for Disney Online. "The buyer culture is really starting to change from a planning perspective. And at the client level, most decisions are now being made from a 360-degree standpoint."
Like Disney Channel, Nickelodeon has aggressively gone after clients looking to reach parents who watch along with their kids. Since 2006, when Nick did some $50 million in nonendemic business, categories like insurance, automotive, travel, financial services, consumer electronics and wireless have become a sizable part of the network's business model. Who knew?
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“Yo Gabba Gabba!” began appearing on Nickelodeon in August, and with remarkable speed it has acquired fans who are preschoolers and fans who are old enough to be their parents...Charles Rivkin, the president and chief executive of Wildbrain, which produces the show, says, “I challenge you to find another preschool show that four months after going on the air is actually selling adult apparel at Barneys.”
While plenty of shows for children have also appealed to adults — “Pee-wee’s Playhouse,” “H. R. Pufnstuf,” even “Sesame Street” — “Yo Gabba Gabba!” updates this idea for a generation that, it has been argued, is ambivalent about letting go of its own youth.
The real deal came when the original creators hooked up with Wildbrain. Back in 2006, Wildbrain acquired a majority interest in Kidrobot, which makes and sells high-end “designer toys” and apparel that appeal to fashionable young adults (who may or may not be parents). Thus “Gabba”-related products arrived in exclusive retail settings much faster than usual, demonstrating consumer demand to other merchandise partners.
You couldn’t ask for more perfect serendipity in partners, which goes to prove that authenticity starts at the drawing board. Had “Yo Gabba Gabba!” been conceived under other premises, it wouldn’t have been strong enough to bring into the Kid Robot world. On the other hand, if “Yo Gabba Gabba!” merchandise went straight to big box retailers you would’ve had a watered down product. The Kid Robot connection offers the brand longevity, with more staying power than it would have had on its own.
(Image: T-shirt recrafted into dress by JinJur.)
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America has a new favorite Christmas movie. A Christmas Story, the 1983 tale about Ralphie, a 9-year-old in 1940s Indiana, and his lust for a Red Ryder air rifle, is everything Wonderful Life is not: satiric and myth-deflating, down to the cranky store Santa kicking Ralphie down a slide.
In a 2006 Harris poll, respondents from 18 to 41 years old named it their favorite holiday movie, while their parents and grandparents picked Wonderful Life or Miracle on 34th Street.
This is one of those little pop-cultural shifts--football overtakes baseball, salsa defeats ketchup--that signal bigger changes: here, in the relationship between the community and the individual. In a traditional Christmas story, the larger holiday is a social good. Here, the Christmas celebrated by the greater society is crass, stressful and risible.
In the end, the characters discover an authentic holiday outside the usual traditions. It's the individual Christmas that matters.
It's the nostalgia of its Gen-X and -Y fans, who remember childhood in terms of divorces and bad haircuts…Ironically, Christmas Story takes place decades before they were born. But [Ralphie] and his friends don't twitter about bells and petals and angels' getting their wings. Christmas is about the kids' getting their due. It's a time of disappointment and bullies but also of dreams…
(This points a direct line to Depression era holidays when my grandparents, for one, decorated a box instead of a Christmas tree. Once again connecting Gen Xers with the GI Generation where honest humor is appreciated.)
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We made the annual trek to Macy's Herald Square to see Santa with much insistence from my 60-something mother. It's the only place where Macy's is like it used to be, claims she who has had a Macy's credit card since 1956. Or is it? She paraded herself proudly at each sales counter waving the 20% Macy's discount card recently mailed to her--Only to be dismayed that the card was not accepted at any of the favored spots that make Macy's feel like the "old days." It's been policy for as long as I can remember that certain discounts are not extended to these leased departments. Yet the prolification of today's leased departments have deconstructed Macy's Herald Square into essentially a mall. So the Macy's my mom thinks is a nod to yesteryear is simply on lease. That makes it impossible for the essence of what was Macy's to ever extend beyond the...(er)...flagship.
But at least we know that the Santa at Macy's is real. According to my five-year-old, he never has to ask her name and he knows that she's grown a lot. That gives Macy's about another five years to grab hold of their brand before this kid hits tweenhood and steps up her retail expectations. As for now, she thinks Macy's is magical--that one brief visit each year holds her imagination for 365 days.
We here at scenarioDNA carry a big torch for Paddington Bear who will celebrate his 50th in 2008. Sadly, we read this on Brand Strategy's blog. We hear you, Brand Strategy! Paddington is not the kind of bear who sells out...a fierce hard stare from "Darkest Peru" to those behind this:
"Paddington Bear (for tis he) is renown for his love of marmalade sandwiches...So why is he being used to promote Marmite? Aside from sharing an opening syllable, the two condiments could not be more different...To mix an iconic lover of marmalade with a divisive, savoury brand such as Marmite is both inauthentic and just as plain wrong as putting both in the same sandwich."
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I was taken a back a bit when I recently started seeing a new Benadryl product currently being pitched via TV commercials. The product is called Benadryl Perfect Measure and is designed for on-the-go parent scenarios. What has me a little uncomfortable here is the how the insights behind the development of a product like this unfolded. Is it a case of a definition of convenience being shaped to plug into a current behavioral pattern of use that is not healthy - but sells a lot of the product. The ugly little secret [video] of this product is that many parents are drugging their kids [video] with Benadryl as a means of controlling behavior. It seems impossible that this fact would not come out in any research that was done. And the ads seem to promote the ease by which you can slip some Diphenhydramine while simultaneously checking your email on your Blackberry. Reminds me of a product I had growing up in England called Dr J Collis Browne's chlorodyne which contained anhydrous morphine and peppermint oil. How about making that into a pocket pack?
The troubles just keep mounting on the image of products made in china. It is without doubt a brand that keeps eroding aided by increased consumer choice and more demand for knowledge by the consumer than ever before.
Beijing has begun a robust public relations effort. Diplomats and government officials are holding news conferences on food and product safety. They are showing contrition in high-level talks with Western officials and offering tours of government safety laboratories to foreign journalists.
Trying to convince the international community of its commitment to product safety after scandals involving everything from tainted pet food ingredients and toxic toothpaste to toys coated with lead paint, the government on Tuesday offered foreign journalists escorted tours of a toy factory and toy testing lab in Guangdong Province, where most of the country’s — and the world’s — toys are produced. The government hoped the tour would demonstrate that new safeguards had been put in place. Read more (NY Times)
As people start pondering what's next, the question we get asked the most is: Where does Gen Y stop? For practical purposes, we end the generation with kids born around 1995.
In other words, any kid who entered Kindergarten post 9/11 in 2001 and after, we put in a subsequent category. Certainly as generations crossover there’s always a bit of gray area. But generally, Kindergarten is when like it or not parents have to let go and let their offspring go to school. After 9/11, it’s when people got more insular and protective. Those people being Gen Xers. Yep. Back to them again.
Their intensity opened the doors for organic, the banning of trans-fat, freaking out about sunscreen and squelching smoking. Whether we realize it or not, we’re still on high-alert across the board, we just transpose our issues.
It’s not unusual to overhear even the littlest kids today talk about war, read protest signs and make comments on the presidential situation. Heck, they lather each other up with sunscreen, warn closest friends about the high-fat in a McDonald’s hamburger and wear camouflage courtesy of Children's Place and Target.
Do I think this is a bad thing? Not necessarily. It depends on the message. Preaching fear and disempowerment and being patronizing are the weakest links in the chain to brand loyalty. I think Gen Xers, those making decisions for the post 9/11 kids, are tired of being scared. Fear is not driving their choices for the children. Or maybe I’m just speaking for myself. But me thinks not.
According to an Advertising Age piece, the goal of the FTC’s current “witch hunt” on food and beverage is to “get a ‘more complete picture’ of their kid-marketing practices, especially in the unplumbed arenas of in-store promotions, events, packaging, internet marketing and product placement in video games, movies and TV programs.”
When asked about it, our response was this:
It's "a wake-up call that time is running out. Marketers are "all worried at some level. They know something has to change. And it's not about advertising. It's about going back to the product drawing board and creating a sustainable brand."
Which begs the question: What is sustainable?
Depends on whom you ask, they say. Our thinking aligns with that of consumers despite the common wisdom that says “better-for-you brands are not necessarily what consumers are looking for.”
We disagree. Consumers don’t know what they can have. It’s our responsibility to show them what can be attained. No different than when one is discussing green design in a home. No one’s going to pay for it, but it’s the designer’s responsibility to present beautiful products that just happen to be green before green is an everyday mandate.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb: The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable
Noah Kerner: Chasing Cool: Standing Out in Today's Cluttered Marketplace
Marc Gobe: Brandjam: Humanizing Brands Through Emotional Design.
Fast Company's Greatest Hits: Ten Years of the Most Innovative Ideas in Business
Chris Anderson: The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More
Lawrence Lessig: Free Culture: The Nature and Future of Creativity
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