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BUSINESSWEEK ONLINE: DAILY BRIEFING | |||||||||||
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BW ONLINE DAILY BRIEFING |
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Some Toy Ads Aren't Much Fun ToysRUs.com, Smarterkids.com, and Toysmart leave you hanging. eToys makes you wanna play again As an experienced former kid, I thought I was an expert on toys. So I sat down to review TV ads for cyber-toy-sellers. First up: ToysRUs.com, in which a chubby little freckled kid gets a raincheck from his parents. He runs around the front yard brandishing it like an airplane, and coos "I love you, raincheck" as he watches TV with it by his side. It's probably just me, but when I hear the word "raincheck," I think of an event that's canceled by an Act of God. So what was this raincheck? Try as I might, I couldn't figure it out. It reminded me of the last time I braved the bedlam of a Toys 'R' Us store, looking for a Chinese jump rope. The store didn't have it. This assignment was going to be tougher than I thought. So before looking at more ads for toy retailers, I hired a panel of experts for the guinea pig sum of two bowls of chicken-noodle soup and some grilled-cheese sandwiches. Sit down and watch, I commanded my friend Hal and his 5-year-old daughter, Zelie. EAT A BUG. The next ad was for SmarterKids.com. It starts in a playground. A little girl is playing with a beetle in a jar. As she peers through the glass at her victim, a question appears on the screen: "Entomologist?" As the girl tilts the jar, the word "or" appears, and as the bug slides from the jar's open mouth into the girl's, we read "gourmet chef?" There are several variations on this theme, including another one that stuck with me: A little boy spinning a merry-go-round to the question: "Disk jockey? Or physicist?" I asked Zelie if she found the first ad interesting. "Yes," she said. "It made me interested in bugs." O.K. So now, it's clear who SmarterKids is targeting: Me and Hal. Except that we had no idea what we were supposed to do next. So we moved on to the Toysmart ads - vignettes that show how out of touch parents are with their kids' worlds. One little girl has a pretend friend. She tells her mom she can't talk to this friend, who speaks only French. The mother gamely tries a sentence in French, and her daughter responds: "Mom, she left five minutes ago." Zelie thought that was funny. But when we got to the one with a little boy and his mother discussing cloud formations, she grew thoughtful. The little boy responds to his mother's suggestion that a cloud looks like something by saying: "No Mom, it looks like a cumulonimbus." When the corrected mother points to something else and asks if it's also a cumulonimbus he says "No, it's a duck." "They never show us what they're looking at," Zelie complained. I was with her. I wanted to know if the cloud looked like a duck. I also would've liked to know what the cloud had to do with the Web site. "Pretentious," said Hal. "As a parent, it makes me want to gag." LET'S EXPLORE. Disheartened, we turned to the eToys pitch. We saw a kid and his dad going through a car wash. "Cool!" we whispered in unison. Later the Dad goes to his computer and types in "car wash." Then we see him and his kid playing with a car wash toy. The tag line "Visit eToys and it will come to you." "I responded quite strongly to that," Hal said. "It's about what you're trying to do as a parent -- push your kids a little further in exploring their world." We were all more alert when the mom and her kid poking around the tidal pool came on. The Mom typed "fish" into the eToys search engine -- and the last frame showed the kid in goggles, exploring the deep. "I might go snorkeling someday," said Zelie. "But you have to really know how to swim, you can't just rest on the sandbar. Of course, a better way to go snorkeling would be to go in a submarine" I looked at Hal. I could see his fingers itching to tap out "submarine" on his keyboard. By Margaret Popper in New York _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ |
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