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This is Part 2 of our coverage of the September 2000 Digital Kids conference, the largest annual gathering of people in commercial Web publishing, marketing, gaming, e-tail, and other businesses targeting kids (here are Part 1 with the overview on teens' surfing habits, Part 3 on connecting home & school, and Part 4 highlighting new sites for kids)....
What marketers are saying
John Barbour, CEO of ToysRUs.com, told about how, after a family vacation in Bora Bora, French Polynesia, a boy named Phillippe emailed him asking John if he could get him a Sony PlayStation II and, BTW, what games would he recommend to go with it? That was John's way of illustrating the access and empowerment that Internet connectivity means for today's kids.
He referred to another kind of access as well - fast access to what's "cool and hip," the lastest-breaking information on whatever is important to their peer group, whether that's the latest "THINK Threadz," nail art technique, or blink-182 CD. At Digital Kids, one hears from marketers in many businesses - skateboards, toys, console games, digital cameras, entertainment, Web publishing - and the premise they all seem to work from is that, for teens and 'tweens, "knowing something before your friends know it and being able to have an opinion about it is where it's at." Those are the words of Molly Lynch, co-founder of Kibu.com, a new site for teen girls.
That spells good news and bad news for parents. The bad news is that the line between marketing and content (on the Web, in magazines, any medium targeting teens) is increasingly blurry. The good news is, that tightness between marketer and consumer keeps the marketer honest. Kids are in the driver's seat. If they aren't interested, if they don't derive value from the experience, they go away. Death to the marketer.
In one sense, Web site publishers are "aggregating" teens for marketers. They're matchmakers more than publishers! "Content is dead," asserted Dan Pelson, CEO of Bolt.com, a popular teen Web site. He told us about Bolt's "contextual marketing," whereby the site created a Cars channel for teens/Bolt members who live and breathe cars. The channel (which of course includes chat) is sponsored by Ford Motor Company. For members it's the place to talk cars (Bolt hopes); for Ford it's a perpetual focus group with just the right demographics for testing product acceptance and design ideas.
So "user-generated" content (aka, chat, discussion boards) - not the stuff created by expensive professional writers, as in magazines - is the mainstay of Web publishers for teens (except for 'zines that have Web sites). Teens like to interact more than merely read. Independent research bears this out; Jupiter Communications says 28% of online kids surveyed said they spend more time with their friends because of the Net, and 42% of teens said they'd rather interact online than in person (a slightly scary thought, but there it is).
Bolt takes it to the extreme, with virtually all its content coming from registered members - chat, discussion boards, polls, etc. Kibu.com also works from the premise that teens want to talk to each other more than hear from "experts," but it uses both while redefining "experts." Its experts in fashion, film, music, etc., called "faces" (you see their photos right on the home page), are more like peers who are "a little bit more in the know," according to co-founder Lynch, than "authorities" in the traditional sense. Alloy.com, another teen site, is also very "user-driven." (Not all teens' parents approve of these sites; see what a subscriber writes below for a caveat.)
ITurf Network marketing VP Rennie Gleason says iTurf created one of its Web sites, Gurl.com, with a "passionate editorial team of three," which on it own - mostly through word of mouth (email-style) - generated enough of a teen user base to create and maintain all the site's content (which again is mostly peer-to-peer - chat, polls, e-cards, user Web pages, etc.). ITurf says marketing is really a "social contract" with users. Upoc.com - a startup that helps marketers give their users tools to create their own communities with wireless Internet devices - plans to take this blur of content/marketing/community beyond the desktop into school, the mall, football bleachers, etc. An example of one Upoc-enabled community, created by a kid in New York, is all about New York celebrity citings. CEO Gordon Gould describes empowerment in the digital age this way: "Are you at the center of your network? Are you the 'go to' person with a lot of nodes attached to you - the authority of whatever it happens to be? These people are self-selected."
That's the good news we gleaned at Digital Kids: A new kind of marketing is emerging whereby the consumer is the marketer, or, as LEGO puts it, the consumer becomes part of the company. Having consumers increasingly in the driver's seat has to mean less hype and more authenticity and substance from marketers. They may not be selling substance, but their audience is certainly expecting something of value in return for their time and attention. We heard from a panel about "Guerrilla Marketing" what lengths marketers go to to figure out what kids want and how to deliver it to them. It's certainly not in old-fashioned TV ads, they say. "Value" is what marketers are trying to deliver - what elicits the words, "Wow, that's neat!" It's the chance to win tickets to an NSYNC concert, a cool sticker for a skateboard helmet, a video of a pro skater doing a "kick flip f/s board slide" and giving an exclusive interview holding the board s/he uses on tour (streamed video that a fan can send to all his friends via email). "If you can give someone something for free that has value to them, that's what guerrilla marketing is," said Chris Storkerson of Nirve.com.
It's also pure information. ElectricArtists.com, a boutique ad agency that markets musicians, hosts online communities that revolve around individual musicians or bands. "We communicate with tens of thousands of teens on a weekly basis," says EA's Marc Schiller. "Kids use artists as brands they congregate around they talk about their lives, not about the artist," he added, suggesting that they derive value from that, as well as from being the first to know what Christine Aguilera will wear at the MTV Music Awards. "Britney's headband can be marketed so authentically via the 5,000 girls in the chat room who saw it in the music magazine," Schiller said. If there's value in it, the teens do the marketing for you, all panelists agreed.
"If a company poses as a teen, it isn't honest, and they know it," said EA's Mark Schiller. "You have to make sure the message is teen to teen, not marketer to teen," he added. Chris of Nirve.com said, "The idea is to work the grassroots. It's a long, painful process." And Peter Sapienza, marketing director at ESPN's EXPN.com ("X" for "extreme"), explained the experience has to have a counter-culture feel to be successful. Both EXPN.com and Nirve.com are all about that community - action sports are about individuality. "We target a lifestyle rather than men vs. women," said Chris of Nirve. Some do, some don't. Polaroid markets specifically to girls, because girls, their research shows, love digital photography, as well as sharing photos digitally (via the Net). But even with gender-based marketing, Polaroid is "working the grassroots," driving Hummers around communities, passing out "sticky pictures" that girls can trade and send in to win tickets to a Britney Spears concerts (which Polaroid sponsors). Next on Polaroid's agenda: virtual sticky pictures to be traded online.
Many of the same rules are being applied to kids as well as to teens. CartoonNetwork.com just launched Cartoon Orbit, where kids can collect and Dexter, Scooby Doo, and other favorite characters in an online community for their fans. SesameWorkshop.org (formerly Children's Television Workshop) has long provided safe little-kid online community with its Sticker World, and Yahooligans! is about to launch safe instant-messaging for kids (more on this in the near future). What they're all experiencing is the "age compression" that ToysRUs.com's John Barbour talked about: the fact that 9-year-old boys, for example, no longer want toys. They want MP3 players, console games, and software.
Lego is playing it smart because of its ability to integrate online and offline experiences for kids. We long ago called Lego's approach "bundled toys" (see our earlier, monthly, newsletter), which we found fascinating, because now Lego fans can use little plastic bricks, motors, a computer, software, and online discussion to design and make robots, then share their designs.
Of course, the ultimate test for the effectiveness of all marketing techniques, new and old, is what happens at the cash register. That's where parents come in. We (or rather, our credit cards) are increasingly being identified by marketers as "the gateway." ToysRUs.com's John Barbour said, "Kids have incredible influence over family purchases," with kids 9-12 influencing $150 billion in family spending and $249 billion for all kids under 18. But it's mothers who actually have the spending power. "Moms [not dads, not parents in general] control over 80% of all household kid purchases," he added. "We should be holding 'Digital Moms' conferences!" He said that 51% of all Internet users are women, their numbers having tripled last year, and 40% of them made purchases online last year. The marketer's three-fold challenge, he said, is, "moms want fruit, kids want candy"; appealing to kids and moms at the same time; and children's privacy concerns.
[Editor's note: All this is great fodder for a school (or dinner-table) debate, the research for which students could probably really get into!]
Related reports elsewhere in the media:
- "Family-Focused Online Advertising On The Upswing While Advertising To Children Declines", a study by a division of market researchers Media Metrix
- "Kids Out-Click Jaded Teens" a report about a recent Nielsen survey from Wired News
- "2000 Roper Youth Report Tracks How 'Tweens and Teens Think, Act, and Buy" about "the lives of American youth ages 6 to 17," online and off
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