Kids Give The Thumbs Down To The Big Breakfast

Childwise Winter Monitor 1996/7 has found that the percentage of children watching commercial terrestrial television in the morning has fallen from 70 to 44% over the last year.

Children’s overall pre-school viewing has also fallen 1% year-on-year to 60%. The Big Breakfast recorded the greatest fall, with its share of kids viewing down by a third. GMTV also recorded a poor performance. Disillusioned kids turned to the BBC. BBC 2 is now the favoured Breakfast viewing for kids, but Nickelodeon has also shown a strong performance, achieving a 13% viewing share.

The report also indicated a high level of response to advertising amongst children. Children between the ages of 11 and 14 were shown a card with colour stills of from a range of adverts. They were asked which of these they had seen and which was their favourite. Almost all the children had seen the adverts for BT, Walkers, Frosties, Midland Bank and Safeway. Only Levi’s advert achieved lower than 50% awareness. Nike was the favourite advert amongst the boys surveyed, while the majority of girls liked the Safeway advert the best.

The survey had a sample of 1014 boys and girls aged 5-14.

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