Clicks for Kids
Sid Ross
There may only be one guiding principle to marketing to kids online, and that is there is no principle. With surfing habits not yet embedded in their portal personalities, the Internet’s second generation-children ages 2-11-spend their early Web years demonstrating few predictable patterns. Kids like to check things out, and in doing so have posted the highest clickthrough rates of any age group online. And the Web sites on which they end up mirror the programs they watch on TV: cartoon-network.com,foxkids.com and nick.com.
“People online behave very similarly to the way they do offline,” said Peggy O’Neill, director of analytical services and principal analyst at Milpitas, Calif.-based Nielsen NetRatings. “Your interests and taste are not going to change drastically just because you’re on the Internet. That’s one of the big [mistakes] marketers make.”
Kids demonstrate a sense of adventure on the Web that causes them to click on ads at a rate more than three times that of Web ‘tweens, a fact that, at first glance, may appear to be good news for advertisers. But it pays to remember that a child’s relationship to a banner ad is an end unto itself.
“With kids, you’re trying to make an impression,” O’Neill said. “They don’t have credit cards, so the endgame is not getting them to buy. The endgame is getting them to nag their parents to buy.”
TOP 10 SITES USING BANNER ADS FOR KIDS 2-11
SITE IMPRESSIONS
MSN 26,000,000
AOL.com 12,000,000
Cartoon Network 10,000,000
Blue Mountain Arts 10,000,000
IGN.com 9,200,000
The Learning Network, Inc. 7,200,000
Yahoo! 5,600,000
Sesame Workshop 4,800,000
FoxKids.com 3,600,000
Netscape 3,300,000
AdRelevance, a Jupiter Media Metrix company, Nov. 2000
DATA POINTS
Average time 2-11-year-olds are online each month: 2hrs. 42 minutes
Average time 2-11-year-olds watch TV per day: 2hrs. 51 minutes
Youths ages 9-17 who say their parents need help online: 66.6 percent
Youths ages 9-17 who prefer going online to watching TV: 66.6 percent
Youths who prefer going online to using the telephone: 50 percent
U.S. 8th-grade students whose schools have networked computers: 91 percent
International 8th-grade students whose schools have networked computers: 41 percent
(*.) Over 15 countries surveyed, including Japan, England, Finland, Iran, Israel, Korea, Russia, Australia, South Africa.
Sources: Nov. 2000 Nielsen NetRatings, Nielsen Media Research. AOL/Roper Starch Cyberstudy 2000, National Center for Education Statistics, U.S. Department of Education.
COPYRIGHT 2001 BPI Communications, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2001 Gale Group
