Tango Is Most Popular Ad Among School Children

BBJ Media Services have just published the initial results from a long-term study into the media habits of young people. The project, Media 2000, is monitoring 2 groups taken from 2 secondary schools in West London.

Media 2000 will track one set of 202 fourteen-year olds through until the year 2000, recording on a quarterly basis how their habits and views change. A second group will be established to track each year of 13/14 year olds over the same period.

Andy Earnshaw, group planning director of BBJ initiated the project; “We all know that kids are fickle and love Tango ads, but this research will give us a good guide as to just how quickly their attitudes change and which areas change most.” Initial findings from the children showed that 47% say they read a newspaper everyday; 100% of the girls said they read magazines, as opposed to 84% of the boys. Girls are more likely to read books and magazines, but boys are more likely to read a newspaper.

With regard to television, the boys were 48% more likely to have satellite at home than girls; of those that did not, 90% of both girls and boys wished they did. Boys were 28% more likely than girls to have a TV set in their own bedroom; three quarters of boys have one. The X files was the most popular programme for boys, Eastenders for girls.

Fifty per cent of all homes had a PC, but only 14% of boys had been on the Internet. Football was the favourite sport for both boys and girls. Tango ads were the most popular among both boys and girls. The favourite terms of approval were “wicked” and “safe”, with “crap” the most often used term of disapproval. A full presentation of the research, with secondary findings will be made at Marketing Week’s Conference ‘Programming for Children’ on October 20.