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Show and Tell: Advertisers Take Pitches to Preschools

The Wall Street Journal
Copyright (c) 1996, Dow Jones & Company, Inc.

Monday, October 28, 1996

By Paulette Thomas, Staff Reporter of The Wall Street Journal

After maneuvering the nation's biggest advertisers into classrooms, a little- known company is now escorting them into daycare centers and preschools.

Cover Concepts Marketing Services Inc. has strung together a network of more than 22,000 day-care centers that pass along product samples, coupons and other promotions to toddlers and their parents.

In exchange, the preschools cough up valuable demographic data about their students' family-income levels, gender, age and ZIP Codes, enabling Cover Concepts clients like McDonald's and Kellogg to more precisely target their messages. The new preschool network reaches two million kids.

Founded seven years ago by two Boston friends, Michael Yanoff and Steve Shulman, Cover Concepts is building on its success in the business of injecting advertising into the classroom. Its free textbook covers are available in 31,000 schools, representing 21 million students from grades one to 12. The book covers display, among other images, Calvin Klein models embracing over a scratch-and-sniff cologne sample and Kellogg's Pop-Tarts springing out of toasters.

"Cover Concepts offers a medium which penetrates an almost advertising-free environment -- the public school," the company explains in its promotional material. School children amount to "a captive audience," the brochures add.

Despite such pitches, the company has largely sidestepped controversy. Its marketing hasn't inspired the sort of furor that erupted over K-III Communications Corp.'s Channel One classroom newscasts containing commercials. For one thing, Cover Concepts doesn't pester reluctant schools, according to Mr. Yanoff, the 32-year-old chief executive. And, in fact, fewer than 1% refuse. "It's funny. We aren't nearly as controversial, mainly because we aren't broadcasting," he says.

Certainly, some educators are leery of creeping commercialism. "We see the problem as getting worse," says Melinda Anderson, spokeswoman for the National Education Association, a teachers union. She disapproves not only of the advertising itself, but also the class time some schools devote to answering Cover Concepts' marketing questionnaires. "The three R's don't include retailing," she says.

Because preschools and day-care centers don't use textbooks needing covers, company executives talked to day-care directors in search of an alternative ad medium. The result: a 16-page quarterly magazine, "SafeSteps," that preschools distribute free. It features safety tips for parents and coloring pages for the preschoolers, alongside ads for products like Mott's applesauce, Golden Books and Plymouth Grand Voyagers.

As confirmed by the Audit Bureau of Circulations, the magazine delivers to advertisers a coveted readership: 87% of its one million readers are female, 80% are between 25 and 49 years old, 65% have a household income of more than $30,000 and 53% are college graduates. Advertisers "know they are reaching parents of preschool-age children," Mr. Yanoff says.

Many preschool directors welcome the freebies provided by Cover Concepts and its clients. Childtime Children's Center in Baldwinsville, N.Y., included the free samples of Nutri-Grain bars it got from Kellogg Co. in the breakfasts it serves. When the kids requested more, the preschool began buying the product as a regular snack treat.

Madelyn Duffy, director of the Childtime preschool, also places a copy of SafeSteps magazine in each child's classroom cubby. "Parents don't see it as advertising," she says. "It's something useful that doesn't cost them anything." Articles on topics like tricycle safety and the hazards of displaying Christmas candles are of interest to first-time parents, she notes.

The demographic data she gives Cover Concepts "isn't intrusive," Ms. Duffy insists, noting that the student-body profile contains the sort of general information that good preschool directors should know. It is left to the schools to decide whether to inform parents that such information is being disclosed; Ms. Duffy says she considers it so innocuous that she sees no need to do so. Unlike public schools, preschools don't provide data on students' ethnic backgrounds, mainly because they don't track it themselves. "I'm sure we'll find a way to obtain it," Mr. Yanoff says.

The preschool program, launched a year ago, greatly expands the data cache that is Cover Concepts' most persuasive selling point with corporate advertisers. Gatorade, for example, uses information on a school's ethnicity to distribute book covers showing Hispanic, African-American and what it calls "mainstream" themes. Nike Inc. targets urban schools. McDonald's Corp. goes for grades four through six, and distributes only within a close radius of its restaurants.

Far from resenting the mix of commerce and education, many cash-strapped schools say they are grateful for the chance to protect textbooks, which can cost as much as $50 each. At a middle school in the Los Angeles suburb of Pacoima -- home of 1950s Latin rocker Ritchie Valens -- Gilette's Right Guard book cover features "Latino Legends," including Evita Peron and Pablo Picasso. "There's usually a subtle message of education or safety, and that's nice," says Aaron Moretzski, assistant principal at Pacoima Middle School. He hasn't had any complaints from parents about the covers or their messages.

A few years ago, Cover Concepts engaged Simmons Market Research Bureau Inc. of New York to survey students at 30 high schools about how extensively the book covers are used, as well as their recall of the products advertised.

A dozen schools declined to take part in the project. But Mr. Yanoff says "it's not terribly difficult" to get cooperation "because schools want to have input into what's on the covers and how it works."

Cover Concepts is currently testing a new Pringles can for Cincinnati-based Procter & Gamble Co. at 24 schools in South Carolina. It distributes the cans and interviews kids about them at lunchtime. If the test goes well, it will be expanded to other schools.

The Gatorade unit of Quaker Oats Co. is now testing a promotional T-shirt that it advertised on some Cover Concepts book covers with an 800 number to place an order. "Yes, it's a mix of education and commerce," says Patti Jo Sinopoli, a Gatorade spokeswoman. "But a lot of what we do is pure commerce."