Tweens on the Screen

It’s old news, though, that kids these days spend lots of time online; what’s more eye-catching — indeed, almost counterintuitive — is that they also manage to watch on average about two and a half hours more TV today than they did a decade ago.

Still, why should tweens — people without jobs, after all — be such a desirable market for advertisers? True, they reportedly control $39 billion in purchasing power. It sometimes seems that they’re the only ones who buy music anymore — at one point last year the top three albums in the country were “Kidz Bop 9,” “High School Musical” and the soundtrack to “Curious George.” But the real reason is that these days, kids win at home too: Nick’s own research reveals a truly astonishing number of families — 70, 80, 90 percent, depending on the product — in which buying decisions are effectively ceded to the kids, on the grounds that they know more about movies, vacation destinations, packaged foods, cellphones and so on than their parents do. There are about 25 million children in America between the ages of 9 and 14, and 77 percent of them, according to Nickelodeon, have television sets in their bedrooms.

There is a vast TV market for kids 8 -14 whose plots are summed up by the mantra "Kid's Win" and whose shows are modeled after retro hits from the old three networks.