Opinion
New year, new marketing strategy?
As marketing decisions need to be weighed more carefully than ever, Jonathan explores how the latest trends should feature in toy companies’ plans for their 2024 strategy.
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n the ever-evolving world of entertainment options for children and parents alike, marketers are facing exciting challenges and opportunities when it comes to capturing attention and conversion. As we enter 2024, there are several noteworthy trends that will reshape how the toy industry approaches marketing, leveraging cutting edge techniques and embracing new platforms. Toy companies should be considering how these should feature in plans for 2024 marketing.
The power of Short Form content More children aged 2-12 use YouTube Shorts (33%) than TikTok (31%) to consume short form content (Giraffe Insights, Little Voices, 2023). The popularity of Short Form content should not come as a surprise to anyone. TikTok’s restriction on targeting children’s audiences has meant that up to now, Short Form video has not been a substantial portion of marketing spend. With YouTube Shorts now firmly established, and in terms of children emerging as the market leader, we can expect that to change. Beta testing of advertising formats on YouTube Shorts took place during 2023 with a full launch expected in 2024. With YouTube already dominating viewing behaviour, and accounting for the largest proportion of toy marketing spend in the UK and globally, diversifying this investment across new formats is a sensible option (dependent on objectives and KPIs) especially when you consider that the latest research from Giraffe Insights indicates that as much as 20% of total YouTube viewing now takes place on Shorts (2-12 year olds). One of the challenges in adopting short form content will be ensuring that brands have creative that fits. Longer form style TVCs aren’t designed for Short Form platforms and can negatively disrupt
viewing experiences, whereas the benefits of adapting creatives for a specific platform are clear. For example, TikTok reports that TikTok-first ads result in an average +3 seconds watch time, +25% in completion rate and provide a 1.2x multiplier on positive sentiment.
Harnessing generative AI to enhance creative output 37% of advertising and marketing professionals (globally) have seen their work impacted by generative AI, the most of any industry polled (Exploding Topics, November 2023). Designing creatives specific to platform may appear to be some form of marketing utopia, given the additional admin and costs this usually incurs. However in the age of generative AI, we can expect this process to become smoother and more cost efficient in 2024 and beyond. Major platforms such as Google and Meta are continually updating their suite of tools to help marketers adapt existing creative, or even build from scratch using proprietary generative AI tech. Perhaps more important is the advent of independent technology companies providing a more unilateral approach. Adoption of such technologies will allow marketers to execute more sophisticated Digital campaigns in multiple ways, including reduced costs, increased speed of execution and distribution, bespoke adaptation to platform requirements and micro adaptations to allow for enhanced A/B testing and reporting through dynamic creative (i.e. background colour changes, text adaptations, etc.) We have been working with and testing a number of partners in this space over the past few months and will be partnering with the best of these in 2024 to launch Optimus Create, the latest addition to our Optimus AI suite of planning and buying tools.
Toy World 100
Jonathan Chambers Director of AV Investment Deflation in “TV” pricing and incremental reach opportunities Linear TV is the lead media for the morning timeslot, which accounts for 28% of all ad recall by 2-12 year olds (Giraffe Insights, Kids and the Screen, 2023). Investment in Linear TV has steadily declined year-on-year-on-year, with viewing declines and the resultant inflation in costs the primary driving factors. However when conducting sales analyses for toy brands, one of the most consistent inclusions in the marketing mix for successful brands is Linear TV. 2024 will not yield a significant growth in viewing, and overall coverage will still be limited to 25%35% dependent on target audience and investment. However, demand for airtime has reduced to the point where we are expecting the cost of Linear TV to decline in 2024. This will not result in huge percentage shifts in spend away from YouTube and other Digital platforms but may increase TV’s share of overall spend by as much as 5 percentage points, compared to the low point of 2023 when it is estimated to have accounted for around 30% of total toy ad spend. In the modern media landscape, “TV” accounts for a lot more than Linear. Streaming services such as Disney+, Amazon Prime and Netflix will feature more heavily as ad funded subscriptions - and therefore inventory levels - increase. FAST (Free Ad Supported Television) channels such as Moochi are launching, replicating the linear experience on screen and increasing eyeballs on the TV set. Then there is also the already plentiful AVOD market (Kidoodle, Ketchup and the like) and Broadcaster funded propositions like ITVX (which according to Giraffe’s Kids and the Screen data enjoyed a very strong launch in Q4 2023), meaning accessibility is increasing all the time. With many households
