Study finds 20% of kids have made purchases in the metaverse
If you believe children are the future, then YouTube is the place to be and you’d better start to understand the metaverse, according to a new study from Precise TV.
The new edition of the “Precise Advertisers Report: Kids,” put together with Giraffe Insights, finds that YouTube is the dominant video channel for kids and that YouTube commercials drive three times more purchase behavior than other media, including video-on-demand and broadcast TV.
When asked where they recently saw a commercial, 64% of the children surveyed said YouTube, compared with 29% who said broadcast TV and 26% who said SVOD.
More so than adults, kids are already adopting the metaverse. The study found that 20% of kids under 12 have made purchases with tokens in the gaming metaverse.
Kids identify games like Roblox, Minecraft, Fortnite and the Sandbox as being part of the metaverse. Parents have less of a grasp on the metaverse, with just 39% identifying it as a computer-generated world where people can socialize, work and play.
The study found that about 90% of parents co-view with the kids, and that’s where the kids’ influence over family purchases takes place. YouTube is the place where parents and their kids are most likely to see an ad together. And almost seven in 10 parents get inspiration for things to buy their kids when they see the reaction to ads, the study found.
“The findings would seem to suggest a more peer-like relationship between kids and their parents, which is truly fascinating,” Precise TV co-founder and chairman Christian Dankl said. “This report not only quantifies household co-viewing, but illustrates a causal relationship between content and family purchase decisions. Brands can make a lot of confident investments — and get ads contextually aligned at the video level — based on insights from this report.”
Kids had the most influence over family purchases of vacations and other out-of-home experiences, as well as technology and vehicles.
“Our research helps the industry keep a finger on the pulse of what content kids love — both programming and ads — and further demonstrates a correlation between contextually aligned ads and purchases,” Giraffe Insights managing director Sadie Buckingham said. “YouTube is the channel where ads are more effective when contextually aligned at the video level. It’s also remarkable to see just how big of an impact entertainment decisions have on purchase decisions. There’s a goldmine of findings here for the modern brand marketer.”
For the study, Giraffe Insights conducted an online survey of 2,000 kids aged 2 to 12 and their parents. Questions were aimed at both parents and their children. ■
