Who can deny the appeal of making the world a better place? Who wouldn’t want to change, for the better, the way kids learn? In our business, lofty goals are abundent. Here’s a list of worthy goals that walked through Brandissimo’s magnificent doors and into our studio this past month alone:
Improving how kids learn the three R’s
Building better citizens through a mastery of civics
Help kids face the challenges of the 21st century through improved critical thinking
Help kids make better food choices
Inspire kids to exercise
It’s easy to get drawn in to worthy causes and projects that earnestly pursue ‘lofty goals’ for our audience, we all want to be making content that matters. We love the ability to open up a dinner party conversation with a pithy “We’re making content that’s going to cure the teenage obesity epidemic!” The key thing to remember when pursuing these goals is to NOT lose your audience because you’re so busy “improving their lives”! We’re entertainers first and foremost. We build entertainment for entertainment platforms – not education for entertainment Platforms. In order get kids to engage in your content, you need to remember not to sacrifice entertainment while you’re pursing the ‘lofty goals’. If this were a food blog, I’d suggest four parts Entertainment to one part Education. When you combine worthy goals with entertainment in equal measure, it becomes a messy soup that more often than not feature the worthy goals negating the entertainment value and turning off the end user before they’ve even engaged in the content.
Here’s four rules that we live by here in the hallowed halls of Brandissimo!
“You can lead a horse to water but you can’t make him watch your TV show or become instantly addicted to the game you just made” Make sure the content is engaging, interesting, and fun before you start applying your curriculum.
“Kids don’t watch “eat your green vegetables television” in fact they rarely eat their green vegetables period – and certainly don’t enjoy being told to. Unless you’re creating a ‘homework helper’ kind of app, I’d recommend avoiding looking anything like school work or something you’d find in the waiting room of your doctors office. Kids today are hyper scheduled and programmed and when they finally get spare moment to unwind with their choice of media, the last thing that they’re looking for is more school.
“Never ever eat in a restaurant that advertises “Fine Food” Kids will smell a rat faster than us “marketing experts” any day of the week. Over-pitching the fun causes kids to look for the lesson plan. Make the entertainment value real and engaging and you’ll be in a better position to capture them with your content.
Aim for small targets and know your audience. There’s a difference between a 5 year old and a 6 year old and an even bigger difference between a 5 year old and a 7 year old. A quick climb up the age ladder and differences expand and contract depending on when kids jump into larger age pools. Moving from pre-school to Kindergarden may not be a huge step – but from Kindergarden to First Grade thrusts the youngster into a reality where he is the youngest, smallest, least dexterous member of this new food chain. The jump from grade 6 to grade 7 can be a mind-boggling loss of innocence. These changes deeply effect the media that these kids consume. A 7th Grader may wear Phineas and Ferb pajamas at night but deny he even watches the show during the day. Those media choices that were once so critical and dear to them are very quickly discarded when they are associated with the previous age pool. When your targets are too broad you end up diluting the value of both the entertainment as well as the education.
