Today’s young web user is tomorrow’s consumer, so it should come as no surprise that investors and large corporations are seeking to invest in social networks and games targeted at pre-teens. Everloop just raised $3.1 million this year and Togetherville was acquired by the Disney Co. all looking to reach the mark that Moshi Monsters has with $100 million in revenue this year, though none of it was from advertising.
“Believe me, we get asked to incorporate branding and advertising all the time,” said Rebecca Newton, chief community and safety officer at Moshi Monsters, which expects to have 70 to 80 million members in 200 countries by the end of this year. “But it’s complicated. When kids tell their friends they just had a mocha latte at Starbucks, they don’t understand that now Starbucks has their name and knows that they went to a Starbucks in Des Moines on Third Street on Thursday and had a mocha latte and they start getting coupons for 20 mocha lattes.”
Along with understanding of ads, there’s also issues parents, law makers and doctors bring up about the social and medical issues dealing with spending so much time online, along with concerns of exposure to advertising. Because of these concerns, Moshi Monsters avoids the issue altogether, focusing instead on sales of toys, cards and magazines. “[Advertising is] exploitative on a high level — getting information from a kid who doesn’t know what they’re doing,” said Newton.
Everloop, by contrast, has sponsored loops built around specific products and not brands. “Our philosophy is to socialize kids to brands and not commercialize them,” said Everloop CEO and co-founder Hilary DeCesare. “Kids will face ads their whole life online, but our goal is to let them find brands they are interested in.”
“We have found Facebook and other online outlets to be a successful tool when marketing to teens but to reach the tween market there are not as many vehicles,” said Lucille Rettino, director-marketing for the children’s publishing group at Simon & Schuster. “Everloop, with its community set-up, is a perfect place to have kids talk about books. Our goal is to create a book club where tweens are reading and discussing our books and talking about them to their friends.”
As for Togetherville, it has neither advertising or subscriptions, instead having parents pay for T-bills kids and spend on virtual items and games. Disney is being conservative about the social space, with CEO Bob Iger saying, “We have to be very very careful with our brand. Until we are certain that we can live up to our brand attributes within that space, we’re not going to do anything there.”
As for a Disney social network, Iger said, “We might do that, but not anytime soon.
Source: AdAge
