By Mark Dominiak

Special to TelevisionWeek

It’s been an odd year thus far in kids media.

In the advertising area, first came Kraft Foods’ announcement of plans to phase out advertising for many of its high-profile kids brands. Then came the news that Kraft, General Mills, Kellogg’s, the American Association of Advertising Agencies and others have founded the Alliance for American Advertising to defend their right to advertise to kids.

In the area of content, SpongeBob SquarePants took it on the chin for bringing up the subject of tolerance, and a controversial episode of PBS’s “Postcards From Buster” featuring lesbian mothers created a flap.

On one hand, it seems like there’s real effort being made to self-regulate and do what’s right by kids. On the other, it looks like lines are being drawn in the sand by outside forces. How does a media planner react to an escalating situation full of mixed signals?

One sure way to appropriately address the situation is to honor the consumer. In this case, the consumer is plural: children and gatekeepers.

When it comes to kids-and, by default, gatekeepers-marketers by and large don’t do a very good job of honoring the consumer. You don’t have to go much further than cereal, snack or toy advertising to get a sense of the problem.

Those who’ve planned on these types of kids brands know the basic strategy: Make a competitive assessment of major brands, get an idea of how many rating points leaders are running weekly, then plan commensurate amounts of gross ratings points to match share of voice, hopefully breaking through the clutter. That’s lots of rating points screaming “tastes great” or “really cool” or “buy me.”

The problem in a politically correct world is that all of those hard-sell brand impressions don’t go over very well with kids gatekeepers.

There are two simple reasons why. First, hard-sell messages reflect the brand’s perspective-“Hi, let me tell you about me”-as opposed to explaining what the brand can do to enrich a child’s life. Second, messages geared toward “magically delicious” or some other product attribute directly address physical sustenance, the most basic among Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. Brands feel they need to do this because messages of this sort push buttons that generate quick sales: “Hey kid, when you’re hungry, eat this. It tastes good.” Or “Hey, Mom, buy this when you’re pressed for time. Your kids will like it.”

When it comes to honoring kids as consumers, pushing these buttons is a bad approach, because kids gatekeepers-parents and watchdog groups-are rightfully concerned for kids on a much deeper emotional level, namely the nurturing of other levels in Maslow’s Hierarchy involving physical health, safety, well-being, esteem and respect. In other words, gatekeepers don’t like marketers exploiting the most basic needs to make a quick sale. They want marketers to take a more active role in what’s important to them as stakeholders: nurturing children at a deeper level.

This situation is an opportunity for media planners to innovate in planning and help brands better honor children. Instead of simply relying on traditional GRP-level-based strategies, a planner could try a messaging approach on a higher emotional platform. Those platforms are more engaging to kids, more comforting to parents, leverage deeper emotional connections and actually give creatives a bigger playground.

Here are three suggestions.