Superfans and evangelizers
Résumé
“Get your superfans to evangelize your IP (Intellectual Property) they do the work for free.” (Insight Kids, 2017)
Every year the trade publication KidScreen holds its annual conference, the KidScreen Summit, in Miami, Florida. The Summit touts itself to be the “world’s leading conference on the business of kid’s entertainment” with 2000 delegates from around the world. At the 2017 conference in Miami, youth marketing gurus from Insight Kids, urged the audience to “get your superfans to evangelize your IP (Intellectual Property), they do the work for free”. The audience of media professionals nodded in agreement and leaned in towards the speakers to find out how to engage the “superfan”. As scholars of young people’s cultures, it was not a surprise that media companies think of children as superfans who will promote media properties, for free, and yet, it was quite shocking to hear it stated so boldly, without any reflection.
These bold statements made by one of the top children’s market research companies in the world, reveal the radical shifts currently taking place in the production ecologies of children’s media (Potter and Steemers, 2017). Young people’s creative labor is becoming entangled with the promotional activities of the children’s media and entertainment industry, as children’s media and entertainment companies groom children to be product evangelizers and pint-sized marketers for their intellectual properties.