VOLUME 21

Heard on the Playground

What's New This Month

Trend Watch

Heard on the Playground

Poppin’ Out on Tour

One was the breakout star of the pop scene, one’s breakup was more popular than anything and the other one simply was just “out there” all together. It was definitely an interesting 2002 for Avril Lavigne, Justin Timberlake and Christina Aguilera. While newcomer Lavigne’s debut album Let Go sold nearly 5 million copies, former pop heavyweights Timberlake and Aguilera enjoyed less success in their latest endeavors. Timberlake’s solo debut Justified, did moderately well, but not when compared to the record-setting success of his previous collaborative works with ‘NSYNC. Aguilera’s attempt to distance herself from her squeaky-clean image with her sophomore release Stripped also distanced her from the sales figures that had made her a Grammy winner.

While the trio had different levels of success in 2002, they all have a similar plan for 2003. The 18-year-old Lavigne recently announced that her first North American headlining tour would be beginning in April. So far, there are already twenty-two shows announced with a few more expected to be added according to Lavigne’s publicist. She also has a promotion tour set with radio shows and appearances in Europe, all set to take place before the Grammy Awards on February 23 where Lavigne is nominated for five awards. Whether she wins all five or none at all, Avril’s tour should be quite a success due to her cross-gender popularity with both male and female tweens and teens that traditionally make up a majority of the audience at pop concerts.

In the senior citizen bracket of the pop stratosphere, the 22-year-old Aguilera and 21-year-old Timberlake, both former Mouseketeers, recently announced that they will be co-headlining a tour this summer. Dates or sites have not been released yet, but in the meantime, both are getting ready to release the third singles from their aforementioned albums.

It remains to be seen if the combination of these two veterans will provide enough electricity to outshine the newcomer. Overall, Timberlake and Aguilera’s have demonstrated their desire to make a transition into the R&B genre and Lavigne’s sound has enough “punk” to it so that her name does not get tagged with the label of bubblegum pop. These tours combined with the recent success of artists who are also songwriters like Norah Jones, Vanessa Carlton and Michelle Branch may mark the timely end of this latest era of bubblegum pop. However, that genre of music has proven to have more lives than the local alley cat.

What's New This Month

Do-bah-do-bah-do…Inspector Gadget

It has become pretty common to overhear adults talking about how far toys have come with phrases like, “they didn’t have toys like this when I was a kid.” This phrase will be popping up even more in the near future, but this time it will be coming from the mouths of older tweens and teens who seemingly haven’t had to experience a world with out Nintendo Game Boys. The latest wave of gadgets intended to make the video game experience even more enticing to kids definitely make Pong seem prehistoric at this point.

One of these new offerings is the Nyko Wormcam, a digital camera that snaps on the top of a Game Boy Advance and lets users take time-lapse or motion detection pictures in addition to normal snapshots. It swivels around so you can take a picture of yourself or what you’re looking at while you play. While the picture quality is still pretty low with a resolution of 356x292, the low cost of $40 and the ability to do some basic photo-editing after connecting directly to a PC more than make up for it.

A product from Nintendo will aid those game players who won’t let anything get in the way of their game playing. That is, they will actually be able to play when something physically does get in their way. The new Wavebird wireless controller for Gamecube is actually powerful enough to broadcast through walls. It incorporates radio frequency signals to communicate, allowing users to be on the other side of walls or windows, as long as they are still within the approximate range of the controller which is about 20 feet. With the same weight as a normal controller and a 100-hour battery life, the Wavebird may have consumers tripping over themselves to get it, but they won’t be tripping over wires once they have it.

As if these last two gadgets haven’t made gaming a totally new experience, the wave of LCD screens for units like a PlayStation 2, Xbox and Gamecube. They attach to each console in a different way, but the screen is the same size for each, a 5.4” backlit LCD screen. While the version for the original PlayStation provides a comparable gaming experience with the added ability to play in a car, the complicated graphics of the more advanced model don’t look as good. However, it will likely take just a few years to make a model that is able to handle these graphics. It’s at that point that another wave of older tweens will be reminiscing about their golden era of electronics

Tech Trends

Making the Connection

Our technology-driven society is making connections with more than just wires and satellite feeds. A recent survey conducted by Harris Interactive® revealed that electronics are bringing families together in the real world. Polling over 700 parents and 800 tweens and teens (children aged 8-17), the survey revealed that parents and their children enjoy using technology to work together on activities such as assembling virtual photo albums and creating holiday e-greetings.

Eighty six percent of the children polled said they enjoyed spending time with their parents in these types of activities, and 94 percent said they wished their parents were as comfortable with electronics as they are. They thought that it would in fact be “cool” if they were, and really, don’t parents need every bit of help that they can get? Eighty percent of parents in fact want to spend more time with their children, with 82 percent agreeing that technology can enhance quality time with their family.

Typical of family dynamics, the survey revealed niches when it came to electronics. Children are primary users of the television, CD player, VCR, and DVD player, while parents are the primary users of the computer, digital camera and digital camcorder. These niches provide further opportunities for families to bond and collaborate on technology-related projects.

The survey also revealed some gender differences in how families interact with and bond through technology. Girls are more likely to prefer working on interactive projects with their parents than by themselves, and more boys (70 percent) than girls (60 percent) said they have taught their parents how to use electronics. It also shows that mothers are more likely than fathers to use technology as both a creative outlet and a means of bonding with their kids.

These cyber-family activities will most likely change over the years, but hopefully the bonds they form will help them stay connected in more ways than one.

Kids

To the Rescue

Radica Games Limited and Fisher-Price announced an agreement earlier this month that has been reached to produce a line of Rescue Heroes™ branded interactive and handheld electronics. The two companies see it as a natural fit that will produce products that will have a particularly strong appeal with preschool boys. The first item will be introduced at the 100^th American International Toy Fair next month, with plans to be on retail shelves in the fall of 2003.

The first product, Play TV Rescue Heroes, will utilize Radica’s successful technology of interactive games that plug directly into a television or VCR, using the TV as the game display. The current games incorporate the physical actions required to take part in activities like baseball, snowboarding or fishing right into the game, making for a truly interactive experience. The Rescue Heroes version will no doubt incorporate the fun attitude of the current, which is “cool guys who are good guys.

Overall, the Rescue Heroes have been extremely popular with the preschool market since their introduction five years ago. The goal of the characters is to provide non-violent action figures that stimulate the “imaginations and sense of adventure” of young children. Currently, there are action figures, vehicles, CD-ROMs and other toys in the Rescue Heroes product offering. This first game for the television and the subsequent handhelds will provide familiar characters to play patterns that children this young are already participating in.

Tweens

A New Kind of Magic Kingdom

It was announced late last year that the most famous mouse in Florida will be gaining a neighbor to the south—a new “edutainment” park geared toward kids and tweens up to age 11. Inspired by the business formula of La Ciudad de los Ninos in Mexico City, the park is working toward a 2004 opening in Miami, and will be called Wannado©. The Corporación Interamericana de Entretenimiento (CIE), a leading “out of home” entertainment company in Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking markets in Latin America, Spain and the US Latin market, announced that their amusement-park-operating subsidiary Grupo Mágico has reached an agreement with The Mills Corporation to work on this and future developments.

The WonderGroup team visited La Ciudad de los Ninos (loosely translated to “The City of Kids”) a few years ago while in Mexico City for a project. Imagine an indoor amusement park where every venue is sponsored by a major brand, and each venue is designed to deliver a positive branded experience. Major sponsors like Johnson & Johnson, American Airlines, Pond’s Institute, Nestle, General Motors and Quaker State, among others, have all been attracted to the park that opened in 1999, hoping to introduce themselves to kids in a positive and empowering way.

Grupo Mágico’s Wannado will be located inside the Sawgrass Mills Mall in Miami and will occupy 108,000 square feet; three times the size of La Ciudad. The $40-million-dollar investment in Miami will feature 70 pavilions. Each one will have a different topic ranging from airlines to media and cosmetics where the kids will be able to role-play in areas that interest them. The vision is to have an array of attractions that represent the cultural, commercial, service and communication establishments that are the characteristic of a typical US city.

Visitors will be able to play out their grown-up fantasies, like being a news reporter or circus performer, while also learning about working to earn money and then spending said money before it burns a whole in their pocket. There is no word yet if they will attempt to accurately represent the commuting aspect of getting to such jobs. Wannado expects to draw 1.5 million visitors during its first year, with plans to replicate the park in Atlanta, Dallas, Chicago, New Jersey, Washington D.C. and Toronto. It is probably only a matter of time before an amusement park modeled after a retirement community is planned to let these hard-working kids and tweens really settle down and enjoy their teen years after the rigors of the typical day-to-day grind.

Teens

I Want My VTV

It was just a matter of time. VTV: Varsity Television, the first station dedicated solely to teens, is starting to debut on cable networks across the country. It has been added to Pod 14 of Comcast’s Headend in the Sky® (HITS), whose affiliates service nearly 7 million U.S. households. A letter of intent has also been signed with the National Cable Television Coop, which currently has over 14.5 million subscribers.

Joe Shults and Kelly Hoffman are the co-founders of VTV. Shults has previous cable experience, having helped launch MTV and Nickelodeon. Hoffman has more than 20 years experience helping to build start-up companies. They feel VTV bridges the gap in youth programming between Nickelodeon with its core audience of kids ages 3 to 12 and MTV and its core demographic of 18 to 34 year olds. While both of those networks reach the teen market, 13 to 18 year olds are not their primary focus when it comes to programming.

VTV will air 24 hours a day. In addition to airing shows and films by well-known producers, it will also air teen-produced material such as films, music videos, documentaries and teen-produced news broadcasts. VTV already has relationships with high schools in the top 100 television market in the U.S. that have professional caliber audio/visual equipment that allow students to produce and deliver high-quality content directly to VTV. This material is edited into stand-alone vignettes that air several times an hour throughout the programming day. Currently the station is only on limited networks, but other cable companies have the opportunity to check out samples and sneak previews on the station’s website, MyVTV.com.

Not only does VTV give teens their own station, it also allows marketers the chance to reach a very lucrative audience. Teens are credited with $170 billion in annual spending, and are the largest consumers of music, soft drinks, fast food, and clothing. Before VTV, this audience was stuck between Nickelodeon, which caters to a much younger audience, and MTV, which usually has an older audience.

It would seem that VTV has a good strategy from a viewership and advertising standpoint: get a media-savvy, high-spending audience and produce material they will enjoy and relate to. If the success of MTV and other similar channels is any indication, we’ll be hearing a lot more about VTV in the future.

Trend Watch

Urban Youths Set the Style

If marketers want to find out what’s going to be popular, they should look no further than the city streets. Motivational Educational Entertainment Productions (MEE) has been documenting for years what other marketers are starting to realize, that African-American youth, among the highest media consumers, often set the buying trends the rest of the world follows. Knowing where this demographic is focusing their media consumption allows marketers to try and interpret what future trends may be as well as work to leave their mark and identity in these sought out areas.

The survey polled nearly 2,000 youths between the ages of 16 and 20 in nine cities across the country. The results showed some very definite differences in entertainment choices among age groups and genders. Some of those results include the following:

A greater number of young African-American males prefer rap/hip-hop music to R&B much more than young African-American females (65 percent of males versus 32 percent of females). Fifty percent of the females favor R&B as opposed to 19 percent of males surveyed. However, the survey also showed that the males’ preference for rap/hip-hop decreases with age.

Movie going is a popular pastime among all African-American youth, with 62 percent of those surveyed saying they go twice a month. The gender gap emerges again when it comes to genre selection. Females enjoy drama, romance and horror flicks, while males lean toward action movies. Both males and females like comedies. When asked which celebrities they most admired, the youth chose male hip-hop artists and male sports stars. Basketball player Allen Iverson and late rapper Tupac Shakur were ranked among the top two.

So, if marketers need a barometer to see where teen trends around the world may be headed, they can look toward the hip and savvy urban youth right here in the United States.

Youth University is brought to you free each month by WonderGroup.

We hope you find Youth University valuable and helpful. WonderGroup, a 360º youth marketing agency provides services including: Advertising, New Product Development, Research and Promotions. You can learn more about WonderGroup at www.wondergroup.com or by calling Greg Livingston, theshadow@wondergroup.com, at (513) 357-2950.

VOLUME 21

Table of Contents

Making the Connection

See you next month!