By William Booth
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, August 6, 2006; N01
ANAHEIM, Calif.
When we got the initial invite from Radio Disney to an event described by their octopussian marketing arms as Generation Z's first "tweenstock," a mega-concert featuring the hottest stars in the fifth-grade demographic, it was OMG, the relentlessly infectious family-oriented happy-message music?
We're there!
Promises were made: All access. Backstage passes. Interview ops. Commemorative glow sticks. An assigned seat.
The "Radio Disney Totally Ten Birthday Concert" at the Arrowhead Pond arena in Anaheim? To be huge. Aly & AJ. Jesse McCartney. The Cheetah Girls. The July 22 event sold out. Seriously, Internet scalpers were asking $129 for the cheap seats. The crowd? An ocean of tweens -- and their moms (a joined entity, we would learn later, known in marketing circles as "the four-legged consumer"). When we arrived in the parking lot that Saturday night there was already a line of limos. Reflect on the awesome power of an economic system capable of producing the almost Willy Wonkian construct: limousines filled with children.
Still in the lot, one chaperon told us that her three charges had spent the entire day pre-listening to the night's performers on their iPods while doing hair, nails, makeup, outfits. "They're exhausted," said mom Judy Chan of Orange County. Funny, they didn't look exhausted. The three girls, Chan's daughter and two pals, all 10 years old, cute as a pail of puppies, seemed positively radioactive with anticipation. "Okay," Chan said. " I'm exhausted."
Entering the arena's giant maw we saw this: white go-go boots, green micro-minis, raspberry berets, blue platform flip-flops and sparkly hair scrunchies.
And the girls -- not afraid of pink.
There were boys, too. But not tons of boys. More like little brothers. There was, however, a decent representation of cool dads, some of whom we meet in the beer line during intermission.
Attention, senior citizens, age 21 and over: In case you've missed it, it's time to GET OUT OF THE WAY. The tween demographic, formerly known as "children," roughly 7 to 13, is red-hot. Tweens are the new teens who are the new adults who are the human ATMs making limousines filled with children possible.
Research reveals that tweens "spend" between $38 billion and $59 billion a year, depending on how one defines the exact age of the cohort and the verb "spend," meaning who is signing the credit card receipts vs. who is ripping the plastic wrapping off the CD jewel cases while still in the store.
Forget dolls. These kids get surprisingly thin cellular telephones. They want spa treatments. They're 9. And beyond what they consume themselves, they shape parental purchasing of everything from vacations to cars to electronics.
Tweens now have their very own pop culture. They don't need ours -- so make Grandpa listen to Metallica in his own room. Cliff Chenfeld, co-owner of KidzBop, which produces G-rated and wildly popular tween music, says companies can now market directly to 8-to-12-year-olds in a way that was not possible in ancient times. "When we were kids, you couldn't slice and dice the demographic the way you can now," he says. "What's happened is there's now media outlets oriented to kids, like Nickelodeon and Radio Disney. In the old days, we maybe had a couple cable channels, MTV and no Internet."
The kids are buying. Chenfeld's last CD, "KidzBop 9," went directly to No. 2 on the Billboard album chart. Every one of the CDs has gone gold. "It's a really strong growth area in an industry that's falling," he says. Tweens now have the ability to propel artists up the real pop charts, not just the kiddie lists.
The trick is appealing to both children and parents. Of the KidzBop tunes, Chenfeld says: "Kids love them because they're the transition between preschool and pop music. Parents love them because they found something that their kids can listen to, and also because most parents are not that old, in their thirties or forties, and it is pop music."
These tweens might save the music business. No fool, mogul David Geffen and his record label have partnered with DIC Entertainment to create a new brand, SPG, to reach tweens and teens via music, television, computer, mobile phones and consumer products, and last week announced their cornerstone will be the "entertainment group" (triple threat: sing, dance, act) Slumber Party Girls.
Said Ron Fair, chairman of Geffen Records and a discoverer of Christina Aguilera: "I believe we are creating a model for a unique form of entertainment that raises the bar aesthetically for smart and savvy tweens growing up in the digital age."
Smart and savvy tweens? Meet smart, savvy Disney, the hydra-headed entertainment colossus. This is how it works: Young actor-singer-dancer stars are promoted via the company's television channels, podcasts, Web sites, movies, theme parks, DVDs, record labels, radio stations, products and concerts.
Take Aly & AJ, the singing sisters. Aly appears on the Disney show "Phil of the Future" on the Disney Channel. Together, the sibs have recently completed a pilot for Disney titled "Haversham Hall." Aly & AJ's label is Hollywood Records, which is owned by Disney. Their hit song -- a remake of Katrina and the Waves' "Walking on Sunshine" -- was included in the Disney movie "Herbie: Fully Loaded." Aly & AJ are in heavy rotation on Disney Radio, which has full satellite coverage of the United States (via XM and Sirius) and 50 terrestrial stations, and is the 24/7 top radio destination for kids, tweens and families, according to Disney.
It is the textbook definition of synergistic vertical media-marketing integration. And there's more! "The four-legged consumer." The advertisements on Radio Disney plug games and DVDs and CDs -- but also minivans, pharmaceuticals and lending services. Why? Because 10-year-olds don't drive.
Mom drives, and she's (trapped) listening. Or as Jennifer Kobashi, Radio Disney director of brand marketing, put it in an article in CMO magazine ("the resource for the marketing executive"): "We know that for every three kids listening to us, we've got about one mom. We let advertisers know our station is for moms and kids in a car as they're driving. We're the last medium and the last message they hear before they step out to make that purchase."
Totally.
Anyway, as we began to mentally prepare our own outfit/hair for the concert, we got a voicemail message from Kobashi on our thick old-person's cellular phone.
"Hello, William? First of all, thank you so much for all your support. We so greatly appreciate it. I have to pass on some bad news that unfortunately we'll have to put a hold on this particular story. Basically, in touching base with the team here we're concentrating our press efforts basically on key markets where we actually have a radio station. Washington is not one of them, where we're in now. I apologize for any inconvenience. We'll have to pull out of it at this time." Etc. It was like taking candy from a big baby.
So we bought a ticket anyway and arranged to meet backstage with Bowling for Soup, the only band at the concert not under contract with a Disney recording label. Yet.
As we entered the arena, Everlife was beginning its set. It's a contemporary Christian girl band that signed a record deal with Disney in January and does songs for Disney movies. As Bowling for Soup tour manager Sean Baggins steered us to the band's greenroom, we could hear the stadium shake with pleasure-shrieking. Nobody screams like girl.
Backstage, BFS were lying around on couches, eating chips and watching Everlife play its short set on a closed-circuit monitor. The BFS frontman, Jaret Reddick, was busy memorizing lyrics.
The first verse of the band's hit "1985" goes like this:
Debbie just hit the wall
She never had it all
One Prozac a day
Husband's a CPA
Her dreams went out the door
When she turned 24
Only been with one man
What happened to her plan?
The "only been with one man" needed a little scrubbing. Erik Chandler, the bassist, sat down and explained, "We have to change some stuff."
This is not a problem. "This is a very unique situation," Chandler said, "where the majority of people in the crowd are 7 to 13 years old." Chandler, 31, with multiple piercings, tattoos and spiky hair, is a father himself. He admits he and his band mates don't really understand how they became a tween sensation, but they are.
Which is kind of amazing, because Bowling for Soup (which took its name from a scatological riff on Steve Martin's 1978 "Wild and Crazy Guy" album) was known as a "drunk rock" party band of fat guys from Wichita Falls, Tex., whose breakout hit was the Grammy-nominated "Girl All the Bad Guys Want."
"It is weird," Chandler said of their sudden association with fans still in elementary school. "Maybe it's just catchy music with a hook. It isn't too complex and everybody can wrap their heads around it. The parents get the underlying meaning. But it's kid-friendly. Why? I don't know. With us, it has to do with . . . having a serious sense of not taking ourselves too seriously."
He says BFS "works like those animated movies," citing Pixar's "Finding Nemo" where the parents laugh at the sharks in a 12-step program and the kids just laugh at the talking sharks.
Around this time, the Radio Disney marketing and publicity team arrived and took a seat behind us, explaining their need "to monitor the interview." Things became officially awkward. After the BFS conversation ended, a publicist politely insisted that we leave.
Leave the concert?
That's where this was going, so we pulled our ticket out. Saved by Ticketmaster. Up in our seat, it was hard to understand what all the fiddle-faddle was about. When we spoke with Kobashi after the concert, she told us that the night was a success, selling 13,000 tickets and that a Totally Ten DVD of the concert will come out this fall. So what could Disney be hiding? That some of the singers and musicians (like the Cheetah Girls and Miley Cyrus) performed to recorded backing? (As the Los Angeles Times music critic Randy Lewis reported in his review, they "had moments where their lips didn't quite sync with what came out of the P.A. system.") So what? "The Cheetahs' energetic dancing and Cyrus' winning smile seemed sufficient compensation for the kids in the house."
It was true. The mouse house went nuts. The girls stomped, danced and spun their glow sticks. Some kids even made the devil-horns gesture with their small manicured fingers. It was like Arena Rock School, as their parents gently encouraged appropriate concert behavior. Plus: nachos. There was no mistaking who this birthday party was for. During the Aly & AJ set, one of them (they're sort of Olsen-Twinsy and so it was hard for uninitiated to actually tell them apart) brought the message home.
Can you hear us, Radio Disney? How are you feeling tonight, Radio Disney? You guys rock! We love you, Radio Disney! When our ears hurt, you guys are doing your job as screamers! We're dedicating this song to Radio Disney! Etc.
But when A&A launched into "Do You Believe in Magic," the Lovin' Spoonful song released 40 years ago, the fans knew the lyrics and sang along with considerable brio.
And if they didn't know the words, or the performers didn't know the words -- no problem -- there was a big teleprompter located mid-arena. In between sets, various Disney characters came out to banter, tout Radio Disney, offer family-friendly messages of hope and empowerment, offer prizes and introduce the next act. After the BFS bit was over, the audience could read on the prompter: "Oh my God, how cool was that?"
Truth is, OMG, it wasn't bad at all.
