Marketing to Kids, Circa 1988

The Lumina Foundation, the American Council on Education and the Ad Council want to persuade more middle and high schoolers to make proper preparation for college. And so to reach them they put an PSA in GamePro magazine.

Terrific idea, if this was still 1988.

The year 1988 was pre-World Wide Web and smartphone. Sonny Bono was mayor of Palm Springs. It was the year Aloha Flight 243 lost several yard of its upper fuselage while in flight. In 1988 the Red Army started to withdraw from Afghanistan. And boxer Lennox Lewis, fighting for Canada, beat American Riddick Bowe at the Summer Olympics in Seoul, South Korea in the Super Heavyweight division.

1988 was also the year GamePro itself debuted and it may have been the last time a PSA like this, which I found in the Alden Keene Cause Marketing Database, had any chance of actually reaching kids.

Look at the boxing glove visual, for instance. There are exactly 153 kids in the 12-18-year-old age range in the United States who have seen a real boxing glove more recently than they’ve seen an MMA glove, which has an open palm. The algebra on the blackboard in the background harkens back to The Dead Poets Society (shot in 1988 but released in 1989).

This is classic ‘interruption advertising,’ to use Seth Godin’s felicitous phrase. Kids read GamePro to get screenshots, reviews, tips and the like, not read lame ads. If I recall the issue correctly, there wasn’t even that much advertising in it. So this PSA stuck out like a sore thumb. And not in a good way.

The call to action is to send the game young reader to www.knowhow2go.com, which is certainly content heavy, even if it lacks a genuine voice. It looks and reads looks like it was designed and written by an old guy like me trying to be young and cool. “Learning how to kick flip six stairs takes determination. So will getting into college,” one of three rotating graphics on the front page tells us.

Know How 2 Go strikes me as a natural for Facebook. But since the summer of 2008 the corresponding Facebook page has garnered a grand total of 527 fans. Where's the Facebook or smartphone app that helps kids plan for college? MIA, it appears.

Someone’s trying here. They’re just doing it in a way appropriate for kids in 1988, not 2011.

How would you reach kids in 2011 in a way that doesn’t violate any laws or breach privacy? How could you make better use of Facebook and social media?

Comments

Part 2: How Chili's Used Cause-Related Marketing to Raise $8.2 million for St. Jude

[Bloggers Note: In this second half of this post I discuss the nuts and bolts of how Chili's motivates support from its employees and managers and how St. Jude 'activates' support from Chili's. Read the first half here.] How does St. Jude motivate support from Chili’s front line employees and management alike? They call it ‘activation’ and they do so by the following: They share stories of St. Jude patients who were sick and got better thanks to the services they received at the hospital. Two stories in particular are personal for Chili’s staff. A Chili’s bartender in El Dorado Hills, California named Jeff Eagles has a younger brother who was treated at St. Jude. In both 2005 and 2006 Eagles was the campaign’s biggest individual fundraiser. John Griffin, a manager at the Chili’s in Conway, Arkansas had an infant daughter who was treated for retinoblastoma at St. Jude. They drew on the support Doug Brooks… the president and CEO of Brinker International, Chili’s parent co...

A Clever Cause Marketing Campaign from Snickers and Feeding America

Back in August I bought this cause-marketed Snickers bar during my fourth trip of the day to Home Depot. (Is it even possible to do home repairs and take care of all your needs with just one trip to Home Depot / Lowes ?) Here’s how it works: Snickers is donating the cost of 2.5 million meals to Feeding America, the nation’s leading hunger-relief charity. On the inside of the wrapper is a code. Text that code to 45495… or enter it at snickers.com… and Snickers will donate the cost of one meal to Feeding America, up to one million additional meals. The Feeding America website says that each dollar you donate provides seven meals. So Snickers donation might be something like $500,000. But I like that Snickers quantified its donations in terms of meals made available, rather than dollars. That’s much more concrete. It doesn’t hurt that 3.5 million is a much bigger number than $500,000. I also like the way they structured the donation. By guaranteeing 2.5 million meals, the risk of a poor...

Cause-Related Marketing with Customer Receipts

Walgreens and JDRF Right now at Walgreens…the giant pharmacy and retail store chain with more than 5,800 stores in the United States and Puerto Rico… they’re selling $1 paper icons for the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation (JDRF). This is an annual campaign and I bought one to gauge how it’s changed over the years. (Short list… they don’t do the shoe as a die cut anymore; the paper icon is now an 8¾ x 4¼ rectangle. Another interesting change; one side is now in Spanish). The icon has a bar code and Jacob, the clerk, scanned it and handed me a receipt as we finished the transaction. At the bottom was an 800-number keyed to a customer satisfaction survey. Dial the number, answer some questions and you’re entered into a drawing for $10,000 between now and the end of September 2007. I don’t know what their response rate is, but the $10,000 amount suggests that it’s pretty low. Taco Bell’s survey gives out $1,000 per week. At a regional seafood restaurant they give me a code that garner...

Cause Marketing

Search This Blog