As I sit here enjoying my third cup of coffee, looking out the window at the water flowing down my street, it makes me wonder if the rain is ever going to stop (it also makes me wonder why I ever left California, but that is a topic for another day). Over the beautiful Labor Day weekend, I took a trip with my family to visit friends in Westport, Connecticut, where the impact of Irene was very much evident in the fallen trees and power lines that remained six days after the storm passed through there. When we showed up at their door Saturday afternoon, our friends’ power had just been restored that morning. My friends were lucky – they had a generator that provided some power to their home, which allowed them to host another family who was without power in the days following the storm. Read more »
Like many parents, I marvel about how much life has changed since I was a kid. Take my son Alex, as one example. Alex is 13, and in many ways he’s a lot like I was when I was his age. While he fantasizes about one day playing in the NBA (despite his 4′ 11″ height), I wanted to be Pat Benatar or Chrissie Hynde. While his taste in music revolves around rap and hip hop, my affinity for disco eventually gave way to alternative rock. At 13 we were both math geeks and loved hanging with our friends. The differences? Alex has a lot more - and in some cases a lot cooler - options for indulging his interests than I did. While there was no “Camp Rock” when I was 13, last summer Alex had the privilege of attending the LeBron James basketball camp and got to meet LeBron himself. And while I met my girlfriends at the mall to hang out, or went to afternoon matinees at the movie theater, a big part of Alex’s social time takes place online, playing games via Xbox Live with his friends or socializing on Facebook.
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Well, it seems that the holiday season is in full swing. Black Friday and Cyber Monday have come and gone, but the sounds of the holidays are around us everywhere in television ads, Internet gimmicks (”Have you elf’d yourself yet?”) and if you’re a Gleek like me, you soaked up every minute of this week’s holiday-themed episode. One of my favorite Christmas songs from my youth was “All I Want For Christmas Is My Two Front Teeth.” Well, with three weeks of open-ended responses in from our KIDS tracker, I can tell you that “teeth” is one of the few things that has yet to show up even once on kids’ wish list items.
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I fondly remember the things my parents used to say whenever we complained about things, like walking a quarter of a mile down the street to the bus stop for school. “When I was a kid, I walked three miles to school, through a snowstorm,” was one of my all-time favorites. And, of course, as most of us have, I vowed never to say these types of things to my own kids. And like most of us, I have failed miserably at keeping this promise.
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Like many of you, I spent a good portion of my Thanksgiving weekend cooking. In addition to the traditional turkey, stuffing and pumpkin pie, my weekend menu included hundreds of portions of Triple Berry Cheesecake, French Onion Soup, chips and guacamole, home-style pot roast and Tikka Masala Kabobs. Now, mind you, not all of this was real food. Much was conjured up in Cafe’ Frazier compliments of Cafe’ World, one of the most popular social networking games on Facebook. As my kids observed me running to the computer to serve up my fruit salad before it rotted on the stove (who makes fruit salad on the stove anyway?), they soon became curious and interested themselves, and before I knew it, I had created a Facebook account for my 7 year-old twins so they could run a cafe’ of their very own. And my kids have a lot of company when it comes to gaming.
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As I sat down at my desk one morning last week and scanned industry news along with items posted on Facebook and Twitter, I ran across something really interesting that one of my Twitter followers posted. “Barbie Premieres Her First Music and Dance Video” read the headline and of course there was a handy link to the video. The video itself is a lot of fun, but its bigger purpose is to promote a new line of fashion dolls being introduced for this holiday season by Mattel. The following morning I came across a posting on KidScreen that highlighted how Disney is also using YouTube as part of its launch campaign for the new line of Toy Story toys tied to the re-release of the first two movies in 3-D.
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Kids. I spend a lot of time thinking about them. Not only do I have four of my own under the age of 12, but the two industries I cover count kids as a primary target audience: 33% of video game industry dollar sales since May ‘08 have been spent against kids ages 14 and under while this same group comprised 82% of 2008 toy industry dollar sales. With both of these industries representing approximately $22 billion in annual sales; that’s a lot of spending influenced by kids across those two industries alone.
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Consumer Technology, Entertainment, Software, Video Games | Anita Frazier, Entertainment Industry Analyst Toys & Video Games | 
September 12, 2011 12:39 pm | 
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