Now with daughters 5 and nearly 3, i feel like I'm really getting into the good stuff of parenthood. No diapers, no strange rashes, midnight feedings...it's all good. With my oldest, we've now taken to the web. First, it was Treehouse TV's website - some decent mind candy and games for a web neophyte child but the anthem of "I've seen that" or "I'm bored" has started up.
The next generation of our web life together is called Webkinz. This is "My Space for Kids" - it is word of mouth heaven, it's so incredibly sticky brand entertainment , I think it probably should be illegal but it's all good fun. My hat goes off to the inventors to create such a well integrated, customer involved, word of mouth generating product.
Here's the general premise - you go to a toy store and buy a fuzzy animal (ours is a cute fluffy eared retriever names Clara). On the hang tag, you get a password to log on and officially get the birth and adoption certificates for the pet (this is buzz worthy). Then you become immersed in a world of incredible options - you build a room for your virtual dog, you earn points by playing games against other on line pets, these points can be redeemed for equipping your pet's room and house with artifacts, furniture and decor (this is getting addictive - must restrain myself from taking over - it's fine if my daughter wants to choose rock all the time in RPS -still building pattern recongnition abilities I guess).
Finally, you get incredibly poignant feedback from your pet. We just returned back from a week's vacation and our virtual pet's happiness quotient went from 70 to 5 in matter of 8 days. The animated pet's first response was "i missed you, where did you go". Talk about guilt trip. It's a constant battle to keep the pet's health, happiness and hunger from redlining by participating and earning points.
So the suitcases aren't even packed away, yet my daughter and I feel obligated to spend the next couple of hours playing games, earning points just so we can come back to this room and cover up any emotional scars by feeding the dog and giving her some new clothes (Is there a Betty Ford for Webkinz addicts, please admit two).
I'd like to talk to folks at Ganz and see if we can replicate the same triggers they used and develop an adult-sized version of WebKinz. If they could achieve that, marketers might finally wrest control back from the consumer and create a desirable brand-filled world that made them feel emotion and was embraced as a fun activity - not interrupting them with ads between their favourite shows, phonecalls during a good home cooked meal or piled in the mailbox between the important stuff. Until then, I guess we'll just watch reality shows.
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