Disney: after your kids. Again
p2pnet news view Kids & Kartels | Advertising:- The Walt Disney company knows where the money is.
Your kids. So now it’s targeting them again, this time with a MySpace-type site.
Having balked at sharing its profits from the most recent Peter Pan movie with the Great Ormond Street Children’s Hospital in London, England, the legal owner of the copyright, it launched Playhouse Disney Preschool Time Online.
It’s, “all part of our age-banded strategy where we are looking to follow the consumer through all their age levels and have something for them at every age,” revealed company spokesman Ken Goldstein at the tie.
Now, “after nearly a year of rethinking its flagship Disney.com site, will soon unveil a major overhaul in an effort to make it less of a promotional site and more of a social-networking site for kids and their folks,” says BusinessWeek.com. “Call it the PG MySpace, or at least that’s what they’re hoping for at Disney.”
Or call it another part of the cynical plan to indocrinate children as mini-consumers.
“Will Disney.com be sort of a 2- to 15-year-old portal the way News Corp.’s MySpace is to 12[-year-olds] to twentysomethings?” – Iger asked in New York recently, says the story. “Well, one of the features it will have is a customized point of entry” much like MySpace, he said.
Customization, “would enable kids to log on to a world tailored to their needs – with Disney characters and games and eventually with movies to be downloaded from the Disney Channel or other company outlets – while teens could log on to take a shot at a new array of online games that the site will also offer,” BusinessWeek.com gos on.
“Iger has said that kids will be able to swap music lists, send messages to one another, and do other things that qualify as social networking in the new MySpace-style Disney.com.”
And all with Disney marketeers watching their every move and using data information derived from the site to help develop even more ways to peddle Disney product to youngsters
“It all sounds great, of course,” adds the story. “But Disney is playing catch-up in a big way. The Disney sites, which include sites for the Disney Channel, Playhouse Disney, and Toon Disney, have been lagging the sites operated by Viacom’s Nickelodeon powerhouse for much of the last few years. Nickelodeon has better mastered ’stickiness,’ or the amount of time that kids stay online to play games, watch videos, and – most important – buy stuff or soak up advertising.”
It’s all here in ink and bytes. Say no more.
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Slashdot it! 
Also See:
sharing its profits – Disney plays Scrooge with kids, November 24, 2003
Preschool Time Online – Disney targets toddlers, January 18, 2006
BusinessWeek.com – Disney Wants Its Own MySpace, January 8, 2006
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January 8th, 2007 at 10:06 pm
don’t worry, you can hang out with gays and pedophiles right here on our own website! FREE! hang on kiddies
January 9th, 2007 at 12:23 am
It’s a contest to see “how low can you go”, like the way grocery stores will strategically place their candy bars on low shelves within the reach of small children — but only at the checkout lines where they can be more closely monitored.
Maybe this may be why there is a lobby pushing for new laws against home schooling (it’s been restricted or banned in many countries, such as Germany recently) Advertisers need to get’em when they’re still young and vulnerable, and schools offer one such mode of attack.
January 9th, 2007 at 12:58 am
“Maybe this may be why there is a lobby pushing for new laws against home schooling”
Do you have any details on this? Thanx