We are like most families with young children. Our televisions have finger prints from curious hands expecting touch screens. Our kids mostly watch reruns from PBS on Netflix. iTunes and Spotify allow us to have spontaneous dance parties to any Disney princess song. We could join the countless other blog posts and YouTube videos about little kids trying to launch apps with a print magazines, illustrating that the next generation is growing up with different expectations of media.
Of course they are. Just as kids who grew up with the Internet expect to always be able to call up any answer with a simple search, my girls (ages 5 and 2) already expect instant, on demand satisfaction. But now with mobile devices, there are no limits on expectations. As a father I am held accountable to every question they have. ("How many types of snow are there?" "I don't know." "Daddy! Look it up on your phone!") And heaven forbid the times when our cell phones aren't charged and we have to rely on the car radio. ("I don't like this song. Play Call Me Maybe again.")
But I am realizing there is even more to this expectation of on demand media. Right before Christmas I was shopping with my older daughter at a toy store to purchase a gift for her friend. As we perused the aisles she was acting like, well, a kid in a toy store. One particular doll caught her eye and she eagerly ran up to it. As she excitedly pointed it out to me, she said, "This is the one from the commercial when we watched TV!" With years of experience being a kid and knowing the expertise of marketing to children I knew this was the likely leading to a plea for a purchase. But then she said the last thing in the world I would expect.
"I don't like it." Why not? "Because it was on the commercial." As I became more and more curious and probed into her reasoning, the best I could surmise is that she was offended by the concept of a commercial interrupting her show and was penalizing the product for participating.
As I have thought about this, and really paid attention to how much of her world truly is on demand and from commercial-free services, it is not unreasonable to see how little tolerance she could have for anything that disrupts her consumption. We were indoctrinated to be patient and tolerant with our media--waiting for a favorite show or song to come on the air and then sitting through commercials every ten minutes. So if this is true, that the newest generation will not grow up as accepting of interruptions, there will be serious implications for advertisers. I would expect there will be increasing focus on more embedded ways to embed messages as we are seeing today with the trends toward native advertising, product placements, and other types of content marketing. And it will continue to get more extreme as these kids become targeted demographics.
But then again, that is a lot to extrapolate from a conversation with a five-year-old. There is an equal probability she simply didn't like the doll's dress color.
