Zwinky Cuties Looks for Audiences On TV

On Monday IAC launched a 2-to-3-month national television campaign to promote its recently launched Zwinky Cuties. I know it's not the first time a virtual world has been sold to consumers through television, but this certainly feels like one of the biggest pushes I've seen. While many worlds rely on viral growth and online ads or distribution partnerships, including the teen-targeted Zwinky, Mike Primiani, SVP of Product Development, says that's harder for worlds aiming at younger audiences.

"We spent a few [television] dollars on Zwinky, not as big of a budget as we have for Zwinky Cuties, but we did a few commercials," he explained. "It's a different strategy. We spend a lot of our advertising budget for Zwinky online. Teenagers are surfing the Web. If you see an interesting advertisement for something like Zwinky, you click through. The sensiibility of the Zwinky Cutie audience, 6-12, is different. Your advertising strategy needs to be different. It's more about brand building, creating awareness of the brand, not only with the end user, but also their parents, creating awareness and aspiration with both your primary and secondary audience."

The Cuties commercials will run with shows targeted at families and females, like Project Runway and Top Chef on Bravo, in daytime soap operas, and, when Thanksgiving approaches, on The Today Show and NBC's coverage of the Macy's parade as well as the family movies that air after the main event.  That's plenty of exposure to kids, but, also to adults.

"Our primary audience is the end user, and the secondary market is really the moms," said Primiani. "They're controlling the purse strings here. And Zwinky Cuties requires parental consent with an email to get online. So we want to raise awareness with them. We're advertising directly on some mom shows,  and we'll have a pretty strong presence in the Thanksgiving parade and the family movies right now."

One thing that stands out to me about the commercials (and those for several other worlds, listed below) is how much they remind me of the toy commercials that I'd see with my Saturday morning cartoons 15-20 years ago. We've all seen plenty of research looking at the way traditional play patterns are changing to embrace the digital world. Study after study shows that we as older observers see it as a transition while kids see it as just another way to play, but these really sell me on the change (or lack thereof).

"It's that same sensibility," said Primiani. "In virtual worlds you're going in and playing dress-up and it's kind of an online doll house in many regards. Having a commercial that underscores that is great."

With the boom in youth-oriented virtual worlds, it's easier to sell someone on the idea of a virtual world, but it's getting harder to sell the individual world itself. We've already seen that play out in competition for and crowding retail shelf space for prepaid cards. That's one step closer to the traditional toy market, and it seems like television advertising may be the next.

Primiani says that while kids worlds will still show organic growth, earlier worlds had the advantage of standing alone in the market that new entrants lack. More aggressive advertising is one possible solution.

"I think you see that growth in kids worlds--Webkinz is a tremendous example--just rather than wait 3-4 years for it to happen naturally, we want to jump start it. They had the advantage of being the first mover," he explained. "My point is this, we could build a really great product, and as people funnel in, they'll spur excitement, but we want to help that happen."

From Cutie's initial launch with Jordan Pruitt as a spokesperson and a live performance in Times Square, IAC seems to be very interested in spurring excitement on its own. While Primiani couldn't disclose specific numbers, he said it's been working so far.

"It's a competitive space, and it's a big push. We really want to go out there and create awareness," he said. "We saw a tremendous response from our Times Square event. A lot of mommy bloggers, traditional media, good celeb buzz. We're very happy with the response we've gotten from that. We don't want to share any numbers, and Zwinky Cuties is still very much an upstart, but we see tremendous growth and we attribute a huge portion of that to this support."

Brief Commercial Round Up

These all link to YouTube--embedding was just getting messy. I may very well have missed a few youth worlds with commercials. Feel free to let me know.

• Last year Mattel ran commercials promoting its BarbieGirls.com MP3 player (I can't find any since they discontinued the hardware side of things)
• Neopets has advertised both on its own and with Burger King
• IAC has run celebrity ads for Zwinky
• Stardoll has run ads in the Netherlands, but, I don't believe in English markets.
• Club Penguin has run ads on the Disney Channel, but I haven't seen any elsewhere.
• One thing to keep in mind, if you go looking on your own, is that there's a wealth of user-created videos that self-identify as ads and commercials--way too many to begin listing here, and many are for worlds that don't have their own professional television commercials. It looks like the bulk are from worlds with slightly older audiences (targeting older tweens and teens or that simply have large age ranges), but the option for simple machinima and video creation seems to be a pretty big draw across the board. Also, sometimes kids just like being on camera. E.g., "A cheesy webkinz commercial made by us":

Comments

[sophie]

why cant i pay in english pounds ?