Effect of Pester Power on Advertisers and Media Behavior of "Pester Agents"

Kid's Channels have Cartoon Network, Pogo TV have another reason to pull up their collars. THE slow upturn in advertising revenue in the broadcasting space is seen as good news for kids' channels in the backdrop of children's pester power in buying decisions in Indian homes.
Kids' channels have possibly not lost as much advertising revenue as other genres would have in a slowing market.

The estimated ad sales, which stood at Rs 54 crore in January 2004 has risen to Rs 140 crore in January 2005. In three years this number is seen rising to Rs 500 crore. Despite the slow down in Revenue levels in many sports channels in recent times, the channels targeted at Children still show an increasing curve.
According to Mr Purnendu Bose, Chief Operating Officer, Hungama TV, the fact that Indian cable and satellite homes are largely single television homes explains the children's power on the buying decisions.
This has prompted a number of non-traditional advertisers to come aboard kids' channels. Cartoon Network, which has been around for nine years, has had a run of a wide range of advertisers including the unusual ones such as BPCL, Samsung, Citibank,Maruti Esteem, All Out and Haldirams.
Financial services company and a feminine hygiene brand are some of the atypical advertisers on children's channel indicating that this genre of broadcasters space has gone beyond children. This is a clear indicative of the fact that the children have a great influence on the products that they don't even use. Among those unusual advertisers on Hungama TV include Ad Pens, Linc Pens, D'Damas, ICICI Pru Life, HPCL,Santoor Soaps and Asian Paints.

Majorly products irrelevant to our pester agents, but having some promotional offers such as these definitely leads them to influence the purchase of such items, basically for the gift items.

Some of the Reasons that lead to such purchases could be:

1. The products that get the visibility among the children and favorably accepted in their deeper conscience have a lot of recall and definitely will lead to repeat purchase.
2. Parents majorly want to keep their children happy and tend to buy the products the children, pester for, provided atleast the products has some basic utility score.
3. Given a choice between a range of products for the same use, parents would choose the product that the children prefer, since there are no great differences between the products in its uses.

As this Santoor soap advertisement shows, the child wants her mother to have a glowing and shining skin and since the marketers target this message of glowing skin through the Mother, it has greater chances of making an impact.

At Animax Channel, the process of advertising sales has just commenced. Having allowed its target audience to sample the channel, Animax is now creating an awareness of its own brand by organising workshops on animation for children.
While most channels continue to look at day parts for advertising sales, Cartoon Network has restructured it around programming strength. Instead of day part sales, it has four main blocks - blockbuster toons, prime toons, super toons and wonder toons. Programmes with the highest TVRs fall under the blockbuster category.

These segmentation of the Channel programs has a lot of financial impact, since the Blockbuster toons refer to the prime timing of these channels and hence the TV channel charges higher rent for broadcast of the advertisement and so on.