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.

Enlisting Dora

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.

Dora is also being used by the National PTA and the CDF in a campaign called Beyond The Backpack. This initiative is designed to engage parents in actively preparing their children for school. In addition to Dora, the initiative engages the star power of Selma Hayek. State Farm is using Dora to urge parents to buckle-up their children. She is also the new spokestoon for the St. Jude's Research Hospital's Trike-A-Thon.

Dora is clearly a marketing hit. With over 950 licenses worldwide and an audience of 6 million preschoolers, Dora is a multi-billion dollar franchise. This subtle move into lending the character's influence to the marketing of important public service initiatives can only increase parents' trust in the brand and potentially extend Dora's reach beyond the 5-year-old cohort that typically watches her.

Can You Say 'Patronizing?' Very Good!

Dora's detractors say Dora talks down to children and that her repetition is like brainwashing. A quick search on the Web finds that a lot of moms use words like patronizing, condescending and even obnoxious to describe the way Dora gives commands to children to do or say things.

That's a pretty heavy charge when you realize that after a hard morning of eating breakfast and watching Dora a child accompanying a parent to the store will be met by everything from Dora crackers to Dora toothbrushes to, well, you name it. If you have a preschooler and you don't live on Mars, you probably have more than a few Dora items in your house.

When Dora's creators explored developing an older version of Dora there was an immediate negative response to a thinner, shapelier Dora with longer hair. Parents complained that the illustration released by Nickelodeon was simply too grown-up.

Dora's creators say each show is viewed by pre-school focus groups three times while in development. They say Dora will continue to evolve and take on important issues like volunteerism, conserving water and environmentalism. Dora's influence on impressionable young minds is certain. She has been able to take on a potentially controversially subject like bilingualism in the U.S. without significant opposition.

But as she presses on and begins to tackle issues where sides have been more assertively taken, it remains to be seen if she can continue to be such a universally accepted character. ¡Veremos!

This work is the opinion of the columnist and in no way reflects the opinion of ABC News.

Larry D. Woodard is president and CEO of Graham Stanley Advertising, a full-service advertising agency based in New York City. He is also chairman of the American Association of Advertising Agencies New York Council and the recipient of many prestigious industry awards, including two O'Toole Awards for Agency of the Year, the London International Award, Gold Effie, Telly, Mobius, Addy's and the Cannes Gold Lion. A blogger and a frequent public speaker, Woodard enjoys discussing the intersection of media, politics, entertainment and technology.