Advertising: Dora the (Marketing) Explorer

April 21, 2010— -- For a little more than 10 years Nickelodeon's Dora the Explorer has been the ratings favorite of the pre-school crowd.

Dora, a precocious bilingual 7 year old, is an aspirational icon for young children. The show has spent most of the last decade as the No. 1 watched show on TV for preschoolers. Like Public Television's Sesame Street, which for the past 40 years has helped children prepare for school; Dora has been preparing kids for a multicultural society in which the Spanish language is ever present and as necessary as math, music and physical coordination.

Now Dora is breaking out beyond her show, videos and product licensing: she has been enlisted in high profile public service campaigns for the 2010 Census and a joint effort by the National Parents and Teachers Association (NPTA) and the Children's Defense Fund (CDF). But is Dora's expanding reach good or bad?

Nickelodeon has long been the acknowledged network leader in reaching kids and in understanding that reaching kids means reaching parents. Its network is broken up into day parts. During the earlier part of the day, when it is programming for the youngest children, it reaches its largest group of parents. Parents generally control both the remote and the purse strings. Once kids, who have the pester power, develop a preference for a brand -- and that brand is also trusted by parents — you have the marketing and merchandising equivalent of an atomic bomb.

The network also understood the power of video early. The Dora video catalogue is huge and once in the home helps further fuel Dora-mania among families with young children.

All of this information was not lost on the 2010 Census. During Census 2000 it is estimated that children were the most undercounted group. Estimates are that over a million children were not counted, three quarters of whom were under the age of 5. So, using Dora as the centerpiece of a campaign asserting that Children Count Too makes sense. The campaign consists of Television and Radio public service announcements as well as Web advertising, posters and hand-outs. The materials are in both English and Spanish.