Company Profile - KidsKnowBest

TMI? No such thing…

The past five years have been something of a whirlwind for dataled ad agency KidsKnowBest as the company builds on its bid to transform children’s views and habits into vital information for creating brand awareness and marketing campaigns. Sam Giltrow spoke to co-founder and CEO Joel Silverman about the company’s success so far.

While the pandemic has been a tricky situation to manoeuvre for many, KidsKnowBest says it has been good for business and, crucially, has helped change the mindset of many toy manufacturers in the way they target their consumers.

Unable to advertise in many of the traditional ways, such as on cinema screens, toy companies have turned to the full-service, London-based agency to find new avenues to promote their product and utilise the expertise from the company, which reaps its data and insight from listening to children and finding out what is going on in their lives.

KidsKnowBest speaks to thousands of kids globally each month, using in-house first party data tools, including YakYak, a quiz app, and also through Youth Trend Spotting (YTS), an intelligence arm of KidsKnowBest, to discover what they are watching and where they are watching it. That data is then used to pinpoint exactly where toy companies should be promoting their product, whether it’s across social media or on-demand streaming services, as well as working with influencers and creators. “The more you understand your audience, the more you can provide brands with services that are needed based on our data,” explains Joel.

Though traditional methods such as terrestrial TV advertising are still a key component of the consumer marketing schedules of toy suppliers, many are embracing a more targeted approach, based on listening directly to children. KidsKnowBest now has upwards of 70 clients, ranging from big corporations to smaller start-ups. The agency recently won a retainer for a minimum of a year with Mattel to look after all of its influencer activity and conversions across EMEA, while it has also signed a similar arrangement with Paramount Global (formerly ViacomCBS).

“When Covid struck, we immediately saw marketing budgets pulled, which we thought would be detrimental to our business. However, the pandemic caused brands to take a step back and reassess where they were spending these marketing budgets,” explains Joel. “They saw a high growth in the social platforms and realised they were a valuable way of engaging with the consumer and, in turn, that generated conversions. Suddenly we were flavour of the month and that has enabled us to grow significantly.”

Commenting on the Mattel and Global Paramount deals, he says: “It shows how these companies trust us, how respected we are in the toy industry and how we are expanding our business globally.”

While social media remains a strong vehicle for reaching kids, gaming is also a growing channel, and Joel predicts it will get even bigger this year. “We have been banging the gaming drum to companies for the last few years – Roblox and Minecraft and all these places where you should be positioning your brand,” says Joel. “Gaming is massive. It has become a social platform - even if we don’t want to think of it as one.”

KidsKnowBest is currently working with a couple of brands to build Roblox worlds and while Joel accepts some companies may be nervous of using gaming due to recent adverse publicity, the company believes it is very much a safe place to target young consumers. “With everything we do on these platforms and beyond, safety is paramount,” he says. “We need to help clients reposition their mindset into where the audience is.”

Joel shares that one current client spent 70% of its media budget last year on TV advertising and saw no tangible increase in sales. This year, it has invested 100% of its marketing budget into social and digital. “This is massive for us, because it is showing a shift, and to be a successful company we need to be helping brands to move the needle,” says Joel.

KidsKnowBest is also expanding on its technology capabilities and has built an internal data tool, Nougat, enabling the team to work more efficiently and to help deliver better campaigns for clients. “If we can be smarter and more effective because of our own first party data, we can provide that to all of our partners,” Joel explains.

Looking ahead to the rest of the year, Joel is itching to get across the pond and see some of the company’s US clients, now that travel restrictions have lifted. His eventual goal is to open another office in the US. “For the next year, our main focus will be expanding on the relationships we have with our current partners and building our presence in the US, because ultimately many of our clients have global HQs there,” he says. “After that, I want us to expand into the APAC region – it is the biggest growth area, the Asian market is going to be huge.”

Another area for focus is the ‘future consumer’ and the agency is attracting many new industries, such as cosmetics and fashion, which are keen to use KidsKnowBest’s insight. “It’s about speaking to brands that won’t realise that their future consumer is as important as their current consumer,” says Joel. “Tesla, for instance, is doing a fantastic job in engaging with a younger audience. It’s so important to keep growing an audience, and it’s fascinating to me what brands are doing to engage with the future consumer. This is a key growth area for us, along with expanding our relationships, particularly in the US, and building our suite of tech products. For me, it’s all about delivering, and so far, so good.”

For more information on KidsKnowBest, contact the team at info@kidsknowbest.co.uk