Nickelodeon, Digital Media & The Kids Choice Awards

This article from “TV by the Numbers” has an interesting breakdown of how Nickelodeon “upped the digital presence” of the Kid’s Choice Awards this year and how they made the experience more interactive for today’s tech-savvy kids (with parental supervision, of course).

The biggest changes in the KCA this year included:

• Fans being able to vote on Nickelodeon’s mobile website and a variety of apps available for Apple products, Facebook, Twitter, and their SMS service.
• Livestreaming across a number of social media websites and the Nickelodeon website
• Orange carpet coverage reminiscent of the Oscars’ pre-show, with multiple cameras showing exclusive backstage content that was streamed live on the mobile apps and Nick.com, interactive polls, and real-time updates and photos.
• The Global Slime Collection, a digital game played through Apple and iOS device apps where kids found slime hidden in photo galleries, news, and videos promoting the awards show.
• A KCA news blog, trivia, quizzes, and two games that were promoted through the Nickelodeon website as well as their virtual worlds and websites (Monkey Quest, Neopets, and Petpet Park).

Rather than stick to traditional marketing by promoting the show on their channels, Nickelodeon advertised on across their multimedia platforms to ensure they reached all their potential viewers and made the promotions more engaging by creating the apps and games.

This was interesting to me because it shows that it’s not only adult audiences who are becoming more and more fragmented.  The incredible growth in digital media has spurred a tremendous amount of fragmentation in audiences, meaning it’s not just on TV and in theatres that people are consuming anymore.  There are apps and Internet services abound where people can watch their favorite shows, get exclusive content, and engage with other fans through social media.  If there are digital options for adult programming, then why not children’s programming as well?

Monkey see, monkey do, after all.  Chances are, more and more kids are participating in this audience fragmentation by watching TV and movies with their parents on their digital devices.  It stands to reason that parents would engage in online and digital content with their younger children and older children who are allowed computer time (or have their own iPhones) could engage in digital content on their own.

Nickelodeon did an excellent job in offering digital consumption options for the tech-savvy generation watching the KCA’s this year.  I think we’ll see more of this in the future, especially as digital devices become more and more dominant in the media landscape.