As millennials grow up and have kids, they’re ceding purchase power to a new audience: Generation Alpha. A recent Horizon Media study found that 77 percent of millennial parents agree that “my child/children are more influential in determining purchases than I was to my parents.” Gen Alpha is emerging as the Chief Procurement Officer for the modern household.
This is an exciting opportunity for brands, but not a new one. The “nag factor,” the tendency of kids to relentlessly beg their parents for purchases, is arguably as old as marketing itself. Research like Horizon Media’s study indicates that the nag factor is more potent than ever. What has changed now is how advertisers can use it. The media landscape has completely transformed since the early days of kids’ marketing, which means you need to find new common ground where kids and their parents come together.
For over 50 years, advertisers have known about the nag factor, a natural law of the marketing universe. They can use the nag factor like gravity, tapping into children’s enthusiasm to reach families and drive sales. But as the media landscape has evolved, so has the nag factor, making it harder to find media events like the Super Bowl that convene kids and parents. Meanwhile, children’s media, as across all demographics, has fragmented across multiple platforms so rapidly that it’s hard for parents (and marketers) to keep up. Kids’ attention has spread far beyond Looney Tunes to new outlets like audio, social media and more.
All to say: it’s time to reconsider the nag factor by thinking about what kids are listening to (not just watching) and identifying new centers of connection between kids and their families.
Also known as “pester power,” the nag factor entered common parlance in the 1970s. The principle of the thing is older, though, emerging in the American postwar toy boom. That’s when plastic became widely available, and Barbie, the modern LEGO and Mr. Potato Head, the first toy advertised on television, were born. The earliest form of children’s marketing focused on toys like these, and brands were skeptical of spending on ads for an audience that didn’t buy anything themselves. But by the 1980s, marketers got wise to what parents had always known: kids have major influence on household decisions. A booming economy and a modern advertising industry realized that nagging was a powerful incentive, leading to broader advertising—food, travel and technology.
However, it’s worth noting that this development happened at a very different time in media and marketing history. Fifty years ago, if you wanted to reach children, you knew exactly when and where to find them—Saturday morning, watching cartoons. What’s more, the whole family was there. This was a period when television was king, a central hub of family life. When you ran a commercial, you could confidently count on the TV to be on and parents to be around. Even in the 1980s and 90s, as cable television proliferated and children’s channels like Nickelodeon emerged, marketing was innovating within a familiar format.
We’ve come a long way since then. TV remains the most popular media outlet, but it looks very different. OTT (over-the-top) video on demand is supplanting live broadcast, and YouTube is the most popular streamer, accounting for nearly 10 percent of all television viewership. Algorithms push people towards more niche content—some adults watch workout guides, others watch Amish recipe videos and others watch recordings of long-format interviews. All the while, new media outlets are growing in influence. Look at how important podcasts were in 2024, for instance.
The shift applies to children as much as adults. YouTube, video games and social media dominate kids’ screentime, more so than traditional television or even streaming platforms like Disney+. Their habits have shifted in parallel. Seventy-four percent of kids ages five to 18 have access to a tablet, and 50 percent of kids ages three to 17 watch TV and movies on them. Sixty-four percent of them are on social media. In this context, short-form content thrives. Cocomelon has dethroned Bugs Bunny.
This presents a challenge to advertisers interested in the nag factor. Ultimately, parents hold the purse strings, and that’s who marketers want to reach. But television is no longer the hearth that families gather around. Short of a Super Bowl ad, you can’t guarantee a commercial will reach everyone in a household. Instead, people of all ages are riding the waves of the new programming and platforms that rise and fall each year. Whether you’re a parent or a CMO, it’s undeniably hard to keep up. Just when you wrapped your head around TikTok, it could be gone. In a world where all our attention spans are shortening, how can you hope to leverage pester power?
The old media isn’t going away, but marketers need to embrace new media if they want to tap into the power of the nag factor. Saturday morning cartoons aren’t going away, nor will children’s commercials, but advertisers will need to supplement their efforts by partnering with podcasts, influencers and other emerging media platforms. In this environment, you have to pick your spots carefully to engage the youth market. It’s essential that a marketing channel is compelling to children and intelligible to the people with purchasing power—their parents.
This is the essential point, the key insight into the nag factor’s evolution. Pester power is only useful if parents trust what their children see and hear. This requires a baseline familiarity with the content kids consume—the easier it is for a parent to understand where an ad came from, the less nagging necessary. But familiarity requires mutual engagement between parents and kids. Not many adults are going to spend hours on Roblox or hop on whatever replaces TikTok. Marketers need to identify the new media hearth of the home, the format that convenes family.
New audio formats like podcasts are the ultimate example of this. They’re a new expression of a familiar medium that provides joint engagement between young and old. Forty-six percent of kids aged 6 to 12 listen to podcasts. Those that do are highly engaged—87 percent say they share things they learned with friends and family. Their popularity is growing, too. In 2023, 93 percent of parents reported that their kids have gotten more interested in podcasting.
Co-listening (what co-watching was in 1980) is also common among the vast majority of listeners. Think about when people listen to them, whether they’re driving their kids to and from school or putting it on in the background while they make dinner. Podcasts are a part of communal daily routines. This should be a major consideration for marketers because conditions like this are optimal for the nag factor. Kids and parents both hear the message and start from a common ground.
Common ground isn’t just good for activating the nag factor, it’s increasingly rare in a fragmented media landscape. At a time when people of all ages are siloed behind different screens, group engagement like co-listening offers a valuable touchpoint that is good for advertisers and good for society at large. Common ground in media isn’t where it used to be, but common ground will always be there. To speak to families, advertisers have to seek it out.