Child Advertisement

These last few weeks, as you know, I have done presentations to several groups of children, most recently to the junior high kids Tuesday. While we were thinking of ideas, I thought back to our presentation to the elementary students, and what made them jump and yell and scream with excitement. From what I had seen, it was what got them involved. Things like asking questions and involving them in activities seemed to raise their interest far more than us talking, and rewards like candy exacerbated the reaction. This seemed to hold true again to our presentation with the junior high kids, which was a simple game of question and answer. After those, we posed to them several riddles, which, if they got right, would gain them a small piece of candy. All of the students seemed interested and engaged with the activity, with an enormous participation rate. I could barely keep up with all of the students raising their hands. So, recently, I decided to see if advertisements elsewhere backed this up. While looking, I found an article entitled "How Marketers Target Kids" on mediasmarts.ca, which seemed to fit perfectly with what my line of thinking was. The article begins with how much influence that the children had on their family in a variety of subjects. For instance, in the choice of food for breakfast and lunch, the child has an average of 96% of influence on where the family eats. The list goes on: clothing purchases (95%), software purchases (76%), family entertainment choices (98%), and family trips (94%). This surprised me, as I knew children exercised influence, but I never realized how much influence that they actually had. The first method that I saw wasn't very related to my type of advertisement, it involved setting up brand name recognition from early stages of life, and my project starts, and possibly ends, this year so that strategy was out. The second strategy, however, related more to my project. It is referred to as "buzz marketing", and it is where a company gets a "cool" person to try their brand in the hopes that it attracts more customers later. In my project, this could be something to try. Getting one kid to join may influence their friends, and their friends friends, and so on. We have a few signed up already, but the downside is I do not know who the sixth grade cool kids are, and we have little time with them still in school. If I continue the camp, however, this may have its merits as now in retrospect I can know that this is a strategy. The final related section of the article that I saw fit perfectly. It went with what we had been doing all along, and it all opened up with the title "Commercialization in Education". This is when a company offers a school money to come in and advertise with posters and presenters in order to promote their products. Aside from offering money, this is exactly what we had been doing. We went to a school, did our activity, handed out our flyers with the Oregon Park District label slapped on there, and gave our speech. Unfortunately, I saw no alternate strategies for advertisement excluding the use of the internet. I feel that at this point, having little time at the end of the year, needing to plan other parts of our camp and do final organization that this strategy is unlikely, but again, if I do this next year, it will likely be incorporated into my strategy and put on every flyer and poster that we put up in order to reach a higher variety of kids with more consistence. Overall, looking up these strategies was a positive and helpful thing to do, and though it may be too late for me this year, next year it could help me and others that I inform of this.