Austin, Texas-based multimedia creator Girl Games is moving into radio and TV, beginning with a radio show aimed at young women to be tested this summer in three cities - Austin, for one, and probably Minneapolis and Denver. Founder Laura Groppe named 1998 as the target for a television launch.
"[Our plans are] about creating a thread through all these mediums," Groppe told Wired News. "We've produced and created something new for an audience that no one was going after, and now we have this huge following of girls." Unlike boys, Groppe says, "Girls won�t spend 14 hours with a videogame" - they want other media.
At the moment, the children's radio market is volatile, with ABC-Disney introducing a kids' network in four US cities last December, and with the folding in March of KidStar, a radio network funded by Bandai, NTT, and the Paul Allen Group, among others.
Gordon Hodge, a radio-industry analyst at Montgomery Securities, points out the dearth of successful children's programming on the radio - caused, he says, by the lack of reliable demographic monitoring of younger children. Arbitron, the standard radio-industry monitoring group, cuts off its evaluations at age 12.
To overcome inadequate research on kid listeners, the Phoenix children�s radio network KIDR AM sells its advertisers on the basis of viewer loyalty: Reaching kids - and parents - early is a key to building brand loyalty.
"Everybody in children's radio has to be totally driven by the product," says KIDR's Christina Wilder, admitting that the field is not nearly as profitable as other areas of radio. "You have to believe in it so much. Otherwise you quit." Although KIDR has programs separated by age groups, it hasn't yet created anything gender-specific.
Girl Games plans to kick off its shows with a 60-second segment on "why it's great to be a girl," which will revolve around themes like bodies, relationships, boys, and parents. Another part of the show will feature a "girl on the street" character who will interview other girls. After the summer testing, Girl Games plans to introduce a 30-minute girls' call-in show. All the new radio content will be tied in to the company�s multimedia products.
