PBS Kids Summit: Who Is Our Audience?

Notes from address by Beth Walsh, Senior Director PBS Research

Online
March spent 51 minutes watching PBS Kids
#1 7 months in a row
Online currently has 10 million visitors

TV
January – 4 shows in the top ten for kids aged 2-5
Kids 2-5 and kids 4-8 were both up 20%

Challenges:

1. Find ways to represent and serve our audience
2. Work together to be more efficient and effective.

Diversity:

- White population slowest growth
- Hispanic population fastest growth. 1/5 of Hispanic population made up of children under 9. In 12 years census projects that less than half of all children born will be white.

Kids want their favorite characters to represent who they are. How can PBS develop content and characters that accurately reflect tomorrow’s children? How do children see all people in the role models you can create?

Growing up digital:
AVG study: more kids 2-5 can play computer games than ride bicycles. More kids can open a web browser than can swim unaided. ‘For today’s children, technology is like air’.

As the standard bearer for top quality childrens media, how can we get in front of our audiences’ needs?

Excited about new technology to customize and optimize the personalized learning experience for the child.

Collective Assets:
PBS want to use our assets to work together to create something amazing and raise revenue for PBS. They used existing examples such as Raising Readers.

Aggregating our assets has a multiplayer effect. This was the driving concept behind the mobile app store and the PBS Kids shop. Putting our resources together will also come into play with new line of PBS Kids toys coming this summer.

PBS want to become a stronger, more unified presence in kids retail space.


How can we do this in other areas?

How to maximize outreach dollars? There is so much beyond content you have to account for in budgets (eg outreach, station relations). How do they reduce expenses? What if PBS developed a model where not all shows need to stand on their own? What if we pull all our assets together to create a specific outreach content bucket such as literacy or STEM?

Stations are looking for a centralized approach to help provide content to their users.