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Children Online

At NMK's Children Online event this week, Dino Burbidge, Creative Director at Digital Outlook, offered ten tips for brands wishing to capture the elusive attention of tots, teens and tweens.

At NMK's Children Online event this week, Dino Burbidge, Creative Director at Digital Outlook, offered ten tips for brands wishing to capture the elusive attention of tots, teens and tweens.

1. Know Your Target. Something of a commonplace in marketing, but knowing your target when marketing to children can involve some very fine distinctions. A child of four is significantly different when it comes to what interests and amuses them to a child only two years older.

2. Go Where The Kids Are. Brands are often tempted to do everything themselves, but this may be considerably more difficult and less successful than partnerships with existing properties. Burbidge suggested that the results from metrics companies may not be as much use as your own research. Lessser known sites such as Swapitshop, a latter-day equivalent to seventies favourite Swap Shop, and AOL's Kids Online have proven effective.

3. Games, Games, Games. When it comes to younger children, games are the commodity they seek online. Older children, especially teenage girls, may show a preference for community, but generally speaking, games are the best bet when it comes to interacting with children. Burbidge recommended the Miniclip site as one of the best places to place Flash games, with a moderately popular item being played over a million times.

4. Free Stuff. If placing a game onto a web site doubles its figures, then prizes and freebies will double it again. A good twist on this is to try to obtain a unique prize such as a celebrity-related item. Brands often think that offering an expensive item, such as a Playstation 3, will be a big hit, but they should realise that there are dozens of sites offering this prize, whereas only one can offer Captain Jack Sparrow's hat, for example. Free stuff does not necessarily need to cost anything, though: if you build it the right way, then earning a couple of stars might offer more than adequate enticement.

5. Create A Story. Children, like the rest of us, are engaged by stories, and they can help bring a brand to life. Burbidge cited the Jetix campaign for the show MonsterWarriors which allowed children to enter the story as a member of the monster-bashing team, automatically generating a fictitious newspaper front page featuring the child's name and photograph.

6. Community. Older children spend a lot of time on community-based sites such as MySpace and Bebo, and it is often on these sites that brands' reputations are decided. Organisations need to recognise that they are no longer owners of their brands, though they do have the opportunity to be part of the conversation, if they want to be. On the subject of social networks, Burbidge particularly recommended Bebo as being open to suggestion from brands.

7. Kudos. For younger children, especially boys, having more or knowing more than the rest of the playground is all that counts. This can mean extra downloadable content available for active members of an online community. Secrets hidden in the depths of a site can work well, and was used for the launch of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy film site. Collector's cards still work well and were used by the XBox 360 gamers community and for the film Happy Feet. These can be developed by an external agency such as Token Zone if you lack the resources or expertise.

8. Age Matters. Children up until the age of five look for rules and are particularly home-oriented. However, over the age of five, they are likely to be wanting to develop there own personality and to express themselves. Clearly this means that the approach taken towards what is available and how children might interact with a site is enormously different. Burbidge expressed some dread of the times when a client brief arrives looking to target four to seven year-olds.

9. Make It Theirs. Brands that allow children to feel a sense of ownership over a site are more likely to succeed. Burbidge pointed to the Fun and Games section of the Lazy Town site as a good example of this.

10. Have Fun. Adults sometimes forget what fun is. The success of things like South Park, badger badger badger and the Fart Button should remind us that children like silly things, and so should the rest of us.