Child-created content
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Brands targeting children have an inventive audience that they’re learning to tap into by giving them creative tools which allow them to produce new levels of engagement
quick facts
- More than 22,000 online games were created and 11m players logged in during the seven weeks after launch of Cartoon Network’s Ben 10: Alien Force Game Creator
- Rising broadband penetration and the mainstreaming of UGC in mass-market products like LittleBigPlanet are feeding younger children’s interest in content creation online
- A brand providing appropriate tools for kids to create, upload and share content can create an experience that is engaging, enjoyable and empowering
- 1,000 child-created films were submitted to the BBC’s Me And My Movie site in 2009 and 750 entered the award scheme the BBC runs with Bafta
Not so long ago, child-created content (CCC) online involved little more than the exhibition of uploaded pictures created offline - a 21st Century equivalent of the gallery of art regularly featured on children’s TV. But when Cartoon Network launched its Ben 10: Alien Force Game Creator platform last October, 11m players logged in over seven weeks and 22,000 games were created.
The platform is just one of a growing number of digital production tools designed for kids as media and brand owners seek to engage with the under-12 audience, not by talking at them but by enabling their creativity.
During 2009, two developments shifted the goalposts. The first was the sharp uplift in high-speed broadband internet access; the second was the rising profile of user-generated content (UGC) beyond social networks and the introduction of products aimed at family audiences. LittleBigPlanet on the PlayStation 3, for example, is paving the way for a wave of digital content creativity among children as young as five or six.
The BBC is at the forefront of CCC. While it still provides message boards, galleries and mash-up tools for children to create their own programme trailers, it’s evolving UGC in a variety of other ways, some driven by existing TV shows, others as digital-only ideas.
CBBC series Bamzooki, for example, is a TV gameshow in which children design their own creatures, called Zooks, using a toolkit available on the show’s website. This enhanced 3D modelmaking software enables users to simulate the races that appear in the TV programme on their computer at home and replay them from different angles. In contrast, Me And My Movie is a non-broadcast initiative offering 6-12-year-olds information, advice and tools for shooting their own film, which they can then upload to the site, share with the online community and enter into an annual Me And My Movie young filmmakers competition run in partnership with Bafta.
“It’s about enabling kids to realise their creativity and gain a sense of empowerment in the same way they once did when their pictures were shown on Vision On,” says BBC head of interactive and on demand Mark Goodchild. “There are lots of tools for adults. The key is to lower the barrier to entry so any child can have a go and get satisfaction, recognition and a sense of empowerment.”
Telling stories
Another content publisher pushing the boundaries is Penguin-owned children’s imprint Puffin Books, which last year launched We Make Stories to unlock children’s creativity and encourage reading by offering tools to publish their own stories in a variety of forms including pop-up, picture and audio books (nma 5 November 2009).
“The big shift has been from treating online as just a distribution channel to seeing it as an interactive platform through which children’s content can be created and shared,” says Jon Davie, MD of digital content agency Zone, which developed the hub and some of the tools for We Make Stories. “Brand owners are already becoming platform providers for older age groups’ creativity, it was only a matter of time before this filtered down to kids.”
Turner Broadcasting’s Cartoon Network is moving ahead with further content creation tools following the launch of Game Creator in November 2009. It has since introduced Alien Maker, an online tool kids can use to create monsters from constituent parts. Each alien has its own powers and users can battle them against others.
“Previously online creative tools were only for the more technically astute,” says Caroline Casey, director of digital development at Turner Broadcasting EMEA. “What has changed is kids’ appetite to engage with content more deeply. Tools have grown simpler and PCs more powerful.”
The reason for growing interest from brands in enabling children’s creativity is the level of engagement this can achieve, says digital youth specialist Julia Shalet, former director of product and user insights for teen social game WeeWorld. “Kids love to create and the depth of engagement achieved through encouraging them to do so is why such tools are used so effectively in education and issues-based awareness campaigns,” she explains. “If a brand can provide an interesting experience, an audience will want to engage, especially younger audiences.”
Effectively engaging younger children by enabling their creativity requires the brand to make a number of decisions. An important starting point is how much and what type of content creation is appropriate for your audience. CCC is carefully controlled on social online game Moshi Monsters, for example, where children ‘create’ only in terms of personalising their monster’s features and accessories then decorating its home.
“You need to find the appropriate level of content creation,” says Ed Relf, marketing director of Moshi Monsters owner Mind Candy. “Security is key for younger audiences and this places restrictions on what content you want them to create and share. Our focus is on ways to translate the content children create with us online into the physical world through merchandise.”
Security doesn’t have to restrict children’s creativity, although it will have an impact on a platform provider’s costs. “You have a duty of care which has an associated cost,” says the BBC’s Goodchild. “The more successful your UGC the more pre-moderation is required. It’s an area you can only cover by throwing more people at it.”
Accessibility and usability are also important considerations. “The key to developing creative tools for children is to make them intuitive,” says Zone’s Davie. “Even kids of four can use a computer - they’re dextrous and pick things up fast. It’s not about offering them something simple but something they can pick up without having to plough through a set of instructions.”
Just as important is building in community aspects, says Alan Duncan, UK marketing director for Sony Europe. “We’ve learned that if you’re going to encourage UGC you need to do more than just supply a creative tool. People want feedback and reward. Both have to be key elements at the heart of CCC because this sort of offering will only ever be as good as the community you build around it.”
Creative freedom
Careful moderation is not just to ensure the safety of children participating - it’s needed to guard against being overly prescriptive when telling them what they can do, and ensuring an appropriate response to the end results, according to Mark William Hansen, business development director for Lego Universe (see box below).
“Many brands have gone wrong with UGC by saying, ‘This is how we’d like you to use our product’ - you just can’t do that,” he says. Nor should you make a child feel something they’ve created is right or wrong. For the 2005 launch of Lego Factory, a service to produce personalised boxes of bricks to build a model a user has first designed digitally, the toy company ran a model-making competition voted on by Lego users. Ten winners- eight children and two adults - were given the chance to be the first to have their digital designs turned into physical kits.
“We quickly discovered children didn’t like being judged against adults whose models were, inevitably, more detailed and polished,” says Hansen. “For kids, story was more important than perfection. They didn’t want to feel their creations weren’t good just because they hadn’t produced a perfect replica of a car.”
Maximising reach, meanwhile, requires more than a single content creation tool provided in isolation. Take-up depends on a variety of entry levels, says Dan Efergen, digital creative director at production company Aardman, which is working with the Tate Gallery to produce a 20-minute film drawn entirely by 5-11-year-olds.
“You need a strong proposition, ideally with varying entry levels according to the skills required and children’s creative ability,” he says. “Another challenge, especially when you want to encourage children to be creative collaboratively in the digital space, is relinquishing enough control so they’re free to create without compromising the structure you need to get things done.”
Pre-production on Tate Movie will begin with in-school workshops for children to agree the storyline. Production development and content creation will then switch online. Aardman is creating a virtual studio peopled by avatars of the production team to act as a conduit between the professional filmmakers and kids as each stage of the collaborative process unfolds. With a million children due to be involved, the £3m project will be the highest profile example yet of CCC when it’s released in 2012.
Case study: Lego opens a universe of creativity
Ask anyone which organisation best engages kids by enabling their digital creativity and one name comes up repeatedly: Lego. It’s hardly surprising, then, that expectations are high ahead of its most complex and sophisticated product launch so far, Lego Universe.
This will allow players of all ages to create characters and worlds, either by tailoring existing Lego themes or devising their own, then accomplish in-game tasks either independently or co-operatively.
Premiered at last week’s CES in Las Vegas and launching mid-2010, Lego Universe is more than a massive multiplayer online game. It’s also a virtual playroom where children can share creations, as they do when playing with plastic bricks at home.
“Kids want a play space they can invite their friends to, where they can create things together and brag among their peers,” says Mark William Hansen, business development director for Lego Universe. “The idea isn’t to replace the physical brick with digital - the physical play experience and demand for that remains incredibly strong. What we hope is, by offering children a new way to build and play with Lego together, the physical will feed into the digital and vice versa.”
Creative play will be enabled in a variety of ways. At its most basic, children will be able to create characters and preset models to build and move around different worlds, either predetermined by Lego or of their own making. However, they will also be able to create models from scratch both online and offline and put them into Lego Universe using existing tools such as Lego Digital Designer (its virtual building software) and Lego Designed by Me (its customisation service offering personalised boxes of bricks to make physical models of a user’s idea conceived digitally).
Filmmaking tools will be introduced as one of an ongoing series of additions and enhancements after launch. Game creation tools will also feature, so users can play preset Lego Universe challenges or create their own. “Children will have the option to keep the worlds they create private or publish them to other players, with all user-generated content moderated,” Hansen says.
“At the moment, Lego Universe is a grand vision. But the fact is we don’t yet know what consumers will do with it once it’s launched. It’s our idea today, but 90 days after it goes live it could become very different and we might have to adapt it in ways we can’t yet know.”