Nickelodeon Kids and Family GPS’s new UK research study, “My Media, My Ads” explores the relationship between kids, advertising and their media habits.As a responsible commercial broadcaster, Nickelodeon UK wanted to look into how kids and their parents perceive advertising across multiple devices, specifically when it comes to on-air and online campaigns.  The study explores these topics using both key “traditional” advertising effectiveness parameters such as recall, image and impact, but also embraces more innovative research techniques like facial coding in order to understand kids’ emotional connections with advertising.The insight is split into three core areas: their media, their recall of advertising and their emotional responses to advertising.
  • My Media:  Our media story focuses on device ownership and usage, and the emergence of a swipe generation. Using the latest Ofcom stats, we know that tablet penetration is at an all-time high, impacting on kids’ media behaviors.  We have seen a return to the living room, with a clear trend for one giant screen that the family shares and multiple additional personal handheld devices. Within this section we also unpick claims around multi-screening, establishing that kids aren’t developmentally capable of multi-screening until around 10 years old.
  • My Ads: The study establishes that TV is essential when targeting kids. It is still the most effective platform for reaching them – 75% of kids recall ads from TV, and it’s also where they prefer to see ads.  We know that parents and kids are savvy when it comes to advertising, so we asked our parents to create media plans as if they were spending money advertising a new product to kids.
  • My Response: In terms of measuring effectiveness, facial coding was the perfect methodology because it allows brands to understand consumers’ unconscious reactions and emotions – particularly useful when talking to kids who can struggle to articulate themselves.  Through facial coding we discovered the impact that environment has on kids’ responses–it was much stronger in a kid friendly environment.

We are proud to announce that this study was recently highlighted in the trade magazine of the Market Research Society, the world’s largest research association.