Getting Tweens Active
How a Media Campaign Can Help Some Tweens Exercise More
www.verbnow.com
David Ehrlich, President, The Track Group, Inc.
For millions of American children, a normal free-time activity is not playing hide-and-seek and tossing the ball around. It’s watching TV and listening to CD’s.
More than five million 9- to 13-year-olds engage in no free-time activity during a typical week, according to a 2002 study by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. And 8- to 18-year olds spend on average more than three hours a day parked in front of the tube and another hour with DVD’s, videotapes, and movies, according to a 2005 Kaiser Family Foundation study.
As a result, not only are more children overweight, they are also more susceptible to health problems, such as high blood pressure, defective gall bladders, and to a loss of sleep. Although those problems might not prove dangerous for most tweens, they likely will as the children grow in to adults.
What Hip TV ads and a Website Can Do to Promote Awareness
Trying to make children and parents aware of the importance of physical activity, the CDC in 2001 launched a youth media campaign. VERB was based on the idea that tweens should come up with their own types of physical activity, their own verb or active word for getting out of the house and playing.
It was modeled on previous youth media campaigns aimed to discourage children from using tobacco and drugs. Instead of telling children that an activity is bad for them, it aimed to promote feelings of autonomy, friendship with peers, and adventure, according to a 2005 evaluation of the campaign in Pediatrics Journal. The campaign was aimed primarily at changing hearts and minds rather than creating physical spaces for children to play.
The targeted audience of VERB was the 21 million 9- to 13-year-olds in the country. It focused particularly on racial minorities, including African Americans and Hispanics.
To reach tweens, VERB did two things. It featured an intensive media marketing campaign, composed of both TV and print ads. The television spots were composed of three 30-second spots that ran on the Nickelodeon and Disney cable channels. They featured sports stars Donovan McNabb, Landon Donovan, and Venus Williams encouraging children to get off the couch and on to the court and field. The print ads featured Williams and Landon Donovan in top tween magazines.
And the VERB campaign featured an interactive website — www.verbnow.com. Tweens can punch in their zip code and choose a sport. They will then be directed to a place in their neighborhood where the game is played. There is also a video tutorial in which Venus Williams shows how to execute a proper backhand, forehand, and serve, while Donovan McNabb shows how to throw a tight spiral and hand placement on the ball.
RESULTS
To gauge whether VERB worked, the federal government hired a research firm to design an annual longitudinal survey of tweens and their parents. Since 2002, the survey has been administered to 3,000 tweens and parents. It asks them about their attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors after seeing the print and TV ads.
What the research found was that VERB increased activity among certain subgroups: 9- to 10-year-olds, girls, children whose parents had less than a high school education, and children who were largely inactive. For example, the average 9- to 10-year old child engaged in 34 percent more activity after seeing the ads than 9- to 10-year olds who did not. Overall, 74 percent of tweens remembered the ads.
Not surprisingly, VERB did produce results among certain types of tweens. The ads featured well-known sports starts and the website is user friendly. However, the campaign fell victim to budget cutting in Congress and ended in 2005.
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