Into Elmo's Den

It's early on the second day of the ninth annual Kid- Screen Summit, a high-powered conference that drew to New York City more than 1,300 animators, video and website designers, cable honchos, licensing experts, and assorted Net 2.0 types pulling the strings of the global business of marketing to kids. Technically, this is a conference about entertaining kids, and to be fair, there are a great number of attendees here who have an overriding interest in making kids smile. But with children, the wall between entertaining and marketing has crumbled. How else to explain the session today titled "Beyond the Click-Through," in which a panel of the smartest minds in children's website development trade notes on how to make kid-oriented websites even stickier. The FCC regulates children's television advertising, but few restrictions apply on the web. The presenters talked about customizing characters, the difference between successful children's TV shows and websites, and the optimum frequency of refreshed content. "You want to give kids the opportunity to play with your brand," said Zack Zeiler, one of the panelists and the president and CEO of Visual Perspectives Internet Inc., a company that creates games for adults' and children's websites that are usually tied to products.

While parents may fret about 30-second commercial breaks during cartoons, the marketers have basically left TV ads in the rearview mirror and moved on to dunking kids in 25-minute-long bouts of online "brand immersion." The goal: Turn your kid into their very own salesman. "At the Geppetto Group," reads the influential marketing firm's promotional copy, "we view integrated marketing as an opportunity to invite consumers to actively participate in the brand." The company promises to guide children down a yellow brick road "from brand awareness to investigation, from investigation to selection, to repeat purchase, to loyalty, and ultimately, to advocacy."

Of the 96 food, beverage, and candy companies that advertise most heavily on children's television, 85 percent of them had websites loaded with games designed to extend the duration of a child's brand exposure and increase the personal bonding, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation's 2006 report "It's Child's Play: Advergaming and the Online Marketing of Food to Children." The sites offered kids the ability to watch actual commercials (53 percent of the time), to customize their stay at the website in some way (73 percent of the time), to be marketed an unrelated movie or TV show (47 percent of the time), and even to become viral carriers of the brand via the sending of brand-touting e-mail greetings to friends (64 percent of the time). During the three-month period under study, there were 12.2 million visits by children ages 2 to 11.

And keeping kids away from the marketing machine is going to become harder. Game systems eat up even more hours than web gaming, which is why advertisers spent $80 million on ads nested within video games in 2007, and in the next three years are expected to spend more than 10 times that amount having snacks, drinks, and shoes written into software. Avatar websites such as Neopets, BarbieGirls, and Be-Bratz are expected to sell $150 million worth of ads each year by 2012, and have already become places to train kids how to shop. The latest trend in screen-based marketing is to complement a web-centered kid world with that of the screens that never leave children's sides: those on cellphones. Disney recently established a web-based destination for kids known as Pixie Hollow, a virtual friendship where subscribing girls can adopt fairy avatars and then use their cellphones to digitally feed Pixie Hollow butterflies. With even the Sesame Workshop studying the possible benefits of Elmo texting your kids, it would be no surprise to see youngsters checking their cellphones long before they reach kindergarten.