Digital Marketing to "Generation SpongeBob" (Dreammachine Kids)

Digital Marketing to
Generation SpongeBob
Gerda Van Damme – Guido Janssens (Dreammachine)
Gerrit Vandendriessche (Altius)
Digital Marketing First, Oct 17 2013

Dreammachine | Rue Auguste Frison 56, 6040 Jumet (Charleroi) | +32 (0) 10 86 12 42 | www.dreammachine.be | 21.10.13

Dreammachine presentation, p. 1

Topics
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Dreammachine & Dreammachine Kids
Description of the audience: kids
Description of the audience: parents
Importance of kids marketing
Kids on digital media
Usability
Ethical considerations
Legal Framework (Gerrit Vandendriessche - Altius)



ABOUT DREAMMACHINE

Digital marketing agency
New business unit starting
from Jan 2014:
Digital Marketing to Kids


KIDS

Brands are among
the first words
children read.


Development: 6 – 8

Brain development
Identify brands

Boys and girls
Not be childish


Between 6 to 8 years
old, the left hemisphere
of the brain starts to
develop more than the
right one. It directs itself
away from the pure
fantasy into the „real
world‟, the child gets an
aversion of everything
that could be „childish‟,
and girls and boys
difference gets more
and more evident.


Kids grow old young

At this age we also that
kids start to imitate the
adult world, the so called
‘Kids Grow Old Young’ –
tendency. In the
following years of the
child’s development, this
trend will get more
intense. And of course,
this intensifies the boygirl contrast.



Development: 8 – 11
Brand loyalty
Social influence
Neurological growth


• Starting from 8 years,
children start really looking at
brands, and develop a brand
loyalty, which can last until the
end of his life. He also starts
taking more and more in
account the behavior of his
friends.
• Approaching 12 years, their
brain starts evolving towards
the adolescent stage, which
will change their life
completely. But attention, at
this age their attention curve
is still much shorter than the
curve of an adult.


Technological context

Offline + online
Continuously connected

Devices are everywhere


This generation lives in a
completely new
technological context. The
rate of innovations has
doubled during their
lifetimes. They are
continuously connected,
and a complete mix of
„analog‟ and „on-line‟
objects – such as this
„monopoly zapped‟,
combining a classical
monopoly with extensions
on the Ipad, is standard.


Values
Rules and roles
Peers, friends & family
Self-esteem
Engagement

Fame: “Dreams
are just a
YouTube video
away”

The values of this age group are very different from
older and younger children:
- First of all, they want to comply to the rules and
know their own role within their group, their family,
and so on.
- The acceptance by peers – their friends, their
family - is getting the main drive of everything they
do
- They want to have success. They see on YouTube
that children of their age can have a lot of success
and they‟re convinced that they can achieve this
too.
- And finally they want to pursue global values.
Climate change, hunger, equal rights are hot topics
for them.



Content
DANGER
RACECARS

ADVENTURE
BOYS & GIRLS
OUTER SPACE

PAST
CELEBRITIES

FUTURE
POP STARS
MAGIC
FASHION

FAMILY

DINOS

OCEAN

PIRATES
HUMOR
TABOO, SCATOLOGY

PARENTS

Fear, love and
hope


Anxious parents
Parents of this generation of parents have fear that their children are not sleeping right or
developing right. They see risks everywhere. On the other hand, they don‟t want to be
authoritarian , they see their children as their friends. But in the same time they are
obsessed and demanding with academic education.
ANXIETY TO BE BAD
PARENTS

TOTAL CONTROL

RISK SOCIETY

PARENTS ARE
FRIENDS
MOBILE KIDS

DEMANDING KIDS

STUDY PRESSURE

IMPORTANCE

Most active and lasting bindings
to a brand are established before
the age of 16.



Importance
Influence kids-related goods
Influence family purchases
Pester power
Website choices
Research has proven that the age of the
children influences which sites their
mother visit, to stick with the main
interests of their family (IAB).


KIDS ON DIGITAL MEDIA

Kids expect digital
media to entertain
them.


What do they do?
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Search
Play
Socialize
Watch video / listen to music
Shop
Read magazines

Shift from offline toys towards online „toys‟ (games
and communities) around the age of 6-8.
At home, out of sight. Online = babysitter.


Kids and online ads
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Banner blindness grows with online experience
Until 8-9: literal interpretation.
9+: marketing should be entertaining.
Hot mediums for kids are TV and online

How?
• Feel only addessed when “it‟s for me”.
• Personalize!
• Give control
• Complexity, magic, exageration, coolness
• Heroes & characters


Games
They guarantee:
• Interaction with your brand
• Fun & positive exposure of your brand
• Repetition of exposure
• Long attention towards your brand
Address the child in an adapted way:
• Put the child central
• Reward him as often as you can
• Let him win as many easy levels as possible
• Let him compete with his pears


Education
Kids and parents use Online for education
• For flemish kids, Google is as important as
parents for getting information (De Standaard,
16/10/2013)
• Websites like brainchild.com, and countless
apps tap repeatedly into the parents educational
obsession



Kids social Media
There are a lot of social network sites for children.
Most of them are dependent of an off-line brand.
Some of them direct themselves to a subgroup,
like Barbie, some of them have a wider audience,
like Club Pinguin, which is part of Disney.
Most of them offer a combination of chat and
other communication tools with games.

This type of sites target the children as well as
their parents:
- The children themselves, which have to make a
simple profile
- Via their parents, who have to make a profile to
approve the subscription of their child. They
then dispose of a kind of parental control board
in which they can follow their children.



Adults social Media
There is an enormous amount of
children beneath 13 on adult social
media such as Facebook – 13 is the
official minimum age for Facebook.
They disguised themselves with a
false age (remember ‘Kids grow old
Young’), mostly with an agreement of
their parents.
They are very difficult to target
because of their false age but you
can find loads of them on fan pages
like Spongebob – with 44 million
fans, or fanpages for toys for small
children.



Social Media

The growth of kids
participation in social
media has been
enormous from 2007
until 2011, but now we
see that the last years
adherence of children in
general is diminishing, in
favor of several types of
instant messaging.



USABILITY

“I don’t know where
I can go on this
website.”


Get the basics right

If the usability broken
for adults, the site
won‟t work for kids.

Children (Ages 3-12 Years)
on the Web, 3rd ed.
By R. Budiu and Jakob Nielsen

But... Usability
research is outdated
by definition.


4 basic usability rules

1

Kids are NOT technically savvy

2

Kids want instant gratification

3

Kids want to see tailored content

4

You will be punished for bad usability



Analysis of an example...

Benetton Kids Community
In 2012 Benetton has launched an online hub „Benetton Kids Community‟,
dedicated to and aimed at digital-savvy kids and their parents.


Confusion...

What we see is that
the boy needs about 3
minutes to find the
first game. So what
went wrong?

Video: see next slide



4 usability axioms

1 Kids are NOT tech savvy



Show users where you are in the
website structure

Website header is different
at each visit of the homepage:
leads to confusion.



Have clear real-life illustrations
with call-to-actions.
For call to actions, children
need clear real-life
illustrations.
At the left button, you see
a link to recipes, but they
are illustrated with
flowers, birds and snails
instead of cooking devices.
Superman doesn’t lead to
a game, but to color plates.
It should at least show a
pencil on top.



Text should be > 14 (12) pt and
well contrasted
• All text is very small
• Some text is written white on yellow
• Navigation texts are as small



4 usability axioms

2 instant gratification



Children will always chose „PLAY‟
Kids will never
click on ‘how to
play’, but
immediately on
‘play’. The
instructions
should be
behind the play
button during
the game.



„Fatal error‟

Here we see the path you have to go through to get to the nearest game in the
site. After a whole quest to gets to the games section, the child gets on a page
saying ‘no plugin installed’. There is no gratification at all, this gives a very negative
brand image towards the child. Note: on this computer the latest version of Flash
and Java where both installed. No plugin download was proposed either.


4 usability axioms

3 show tailored content



Separate content for different target users.
Make it clear where to go.

Intended for kids 

for preschoolers 

 for parents (sign up)

 for parents (pdf)


“Not for me”

You should avoid the ‘not for me’experience.
The videos are for preschoolers, while the
games are rather for elder kids. When a
child clicks on ‘how it works’, he gets an
adult-layouted page with an ‘adult’ text.



“For me?” Avoid pdf.
Avoid pdf where possible.
It’s a technical environment
the children do not know.



4 usability axioms

4 if not... you will be punished



Result: mainly appealing to mothers

For example, in the
Benneton
community we see
at the picture
gallery that the real
audience are
mothers of
preschoolers and
that the rest of the
audience almost
doesn’t participate
in the website.



So think before you start!

1

Kids are NOT technically savvy

2

Kids want instant gratification

3

Kids want to see tailored content

4

You will be punished for bad usability



ETHICAL CONSIDERATIONS

“A magazine is an
iPad that doesn’t
work” – 1 year old baby.


„Compensation marketing‟
• Ad awareness?
• „Unhealthy‟ food marketing
• “Reprogramming” of the
child‟s brain
• Loss of real social contact
• Loss of „essential
capacities‟
• Unhealthy lifestyle (inside,
sitting)
• Violent games
• Web unsafety

• Sector agreements: Codes
of conduct
• Brands inciting to play
outside, have „unplugged‟
experiences
• Brands stimulating to play
together
• Brands teaching about
healthy food, etc.


LEGAL ISSUES

Legal issues of kids marketing
Gerrit Vandendriessche
Partner at ALTIUS lawyers
Brussels



Legal checklist
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Which child?
Data protection
Direct marketing
No misleading advertising
No agressive advertising
Promotional games
Sector specific laws
Sector specific codes of conduct


In our series of
conferences about
on-line kids
marketing, a
conference by Gerrit
Vandendriessche is
foreseen on February
6, 2014.


Legal conference
“Legal issues of digital marketing towards
children: what you might do as a parent but
cannot do as an advertiser.”
• This seminar will present the most common legal
issues when engaging in digital marketing
towards children.
• It will deal with
– the processing of the data of children,
– how you can engage in direct marketing towards children,
– which advertising claims are not allowed when interfacing
with children,
– how on-line promotional games for children can be
organized, etc.

This conference,
organized by
Dreammachine Kids,
will be given by Gerrit
Vandendriessche on
February 6, 2014 in
the offices from Altius
(Tour & Taxis)


CLOSURE
Subscribe for our free whitepapers and ask your invitations to our more in depth seminars
by sending an e-mail to gerda@dreammachine.be. Seats are limited!
Free 2 hour conferences will be given from December to April in Brussels or Jumet
(Charleroi Nord) about the following subjects :

1

Usability for kids: what every advertiser should be aware of.

Charleroi

Dec 19th 2014

2

Legal issues of digital marketing towards children: what you might do as a parent
but cannot do as an advertiser.

Brussels

Feb 6th 2014

3

Generation SpongeBob: let your digital marketing strategy tap into this
generation’s characteristics and digital media consumption.

Charleroi

Feb 27th 2014

4

Digital trends for advertisers to kids: 2014 trends and cases.

Charleroi

April 3rd 2014

Do you have digital marketing projects or do you need guidance for your
digital marketing strategy?
Ask for a meeting! 010/86 12 42, gerda@dreammachine.be.



Digital Marketing to "Generation SpongeBob" (Dreammachine Kids)

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