4 September 2003

Kids and Competitions

According to the latest findings from McNair Ingenuity's kids omnibus - Australian Kids Consumer Insights, a quarterly survey among children 6-13, girls are more responsive to competitions than boys, regardless of the device used to enter. Boys and girls are however more similar in their usage of 1900 numbers and websites than magazines which are the preferred medium for girls, particularly those under 10 years of age. Magazine based competitions are the most popular style of competition for kids, particularly for girls. Girls aged 10-13 were the most likely group to have entered a competition in a magazine (48%). Over a third of girls aged under 10 (37%) had entered a magazine competition. Boys, with lower overall readership of magazines, were less likely to have entered a magazine competition with 32% of under 10 year olds and 36% of 10-13 year old boys having entered a competition in a magazine.

Nearly one in three kids with internet access at home have entered a website competition and for all kids one in five have entered online.

Overall girls were still more likely to have entered a website competition than boys, (21% versus 16%) however the margin between the sexes was much smaller than for magazines.

Website competitions were more likely to be entered by older kids with only 13% of both boys and girls under 10 entering a competition on a website. However by the age of 10-13, girls (29%) were much more likely to have entered a website competition than boys (19%).

Girls were also slightly more likely to enter a 1900 competition compared to boys (31% versus 28%), but the real differences were again driven by age. Under 10 years of age only 17% of boys and girls had called a 1900 number to enter a competition. By their teens, more than twice as many kids had used a 1900 number to enter a competition (39% of boys aged 10-13 and 45% of girls).

How This Research Was Conducted

This topic was included in the ongoing Australian Kids Consumer Insights research program conducted by McNair Ingenuity Research in May 2003. The survey was conducted by means of a combination telephone interview and self-completion survey amongst 300 kids across Australia.

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