As advertiser interest in children’s programming increases and commercial broadcasters’ efforts in the children’s programming realm heats up, the resulting highly competitive market has created branding mania, with some positive side effects for kids’ show producers.

Here’s how it works:

It was the morning of the first day of school this year, and Little Miss Vandoorn was not getting dressed.

Hilary, nine, fresh out of the bath and on her way to grade three, looked at her new back-to-school outfit then stared defiantly at her mom. She was not wearing that, she said clearly. She was wearing her ytv Psyko Blast t-shirt and her ytv hat, both take-aways from ytv’s fall season promotion at Canada’s Wonderland. She won, naturally, trotting to the bus stop a half-hour later complete with a green ytv knapsack hanging from her shoulder.

Score one for the ytv branding machine.

Actually, score millions. In the scheme of creating an identity with the kiddie set, nobody does it better right now than ytv. Number one in the specialty lineup with the two-11 and 12-17 demo, ytv’s conservative estimate pegs advertising revenues up by 9% this year, ably propelled by solid programming and a promotion budget of about $2 million.

It’s a tough, increasingly saturated kids’ market. While CanWest Global and ytv have, between them, pretty much cornered the weekend morning crowd for the last couple of years, Baton Broadcasting Systems, full speed ahead into extended, directed Saturday and Sunday morning blocks this year, will record ad revenues on its kids’ programming more than double the previous two years, says Paul Robertson, Baton senior vp marketing and sales.

The Baton factor, in tandem with Fox nunchakuing into the children’s demos, teletoon looming, and, should it successfully negotiate the cable universe, the entrance of ytv’s TreeHouse tv, is turning what was once a strategy of well-placed interstitials into an all-out promotions turf war for the hearts, minds, and eyeballs of the tween and younger viewing audience.

Canada’s $200 million animation industry is well positioned to capitalize on the kids’ fever gripping the television industry, nationally and internationally. In the u.s., Disney, Fox, Warner, Nickelodeon, Turner and Murdoch all either have or are in the midst of planning all-kids’ channels, some targeting worldwide distribution.

Closer to home, the competitive environment, combined with the presence of increasingly willing advertisers of high-end merchandise like video games and music appliances in search of the younger targets, is also playing a part in upping the ante on children’s program promotion.

No question content is king and primetime is still the largest marketing budget drain, but kids are getting a bigger chunk of money and creative attention from the private broadcasters who have short-term profits and long-term loyalty top-of-mind through a mix of diversified promotion strategies.

New Web sites, newsletters, membership cards, tvo’s pjs, BBS Master Control, Global’s Kid’s Club, ytv’s TreeHouse and The Zone, all approaches complete with funky (yet repetitive) interstitials and shiny, happy, talented ‘kids’ designed to create an environment and keep the target markets returning.

Case in point, Baton and BBS Master Control, which has expanded its kids’ slots to include a three-hour Sunday morning block and taken Jennifer Beech, who began doing interstitials for them, and turned her into their children’s audience personality, complete with two new nationally-syndicated dedicated Jenn and friends half-hours this season.

On the horizon is the January launch of a membership card program, which will include letters from Jen, prizes and coupons, and is sponsored by two of the biggest advertisers in Canada, McDonald’s and Wal-Mart.

The original goal was to expand Baton’s kids’ programming demographics and tap new sources of revenue, says Robertson. Revenues are up in part because of Beech and the environment format, which Baton, like ytv, Global and tvo, has adopted.

‘The strategic task is to harness the audience in an interactive way,’ says Robertson. ‘If you’re touting an audience only, you can get a certain distance, but if you transcend that and create an environment, then you’re working at a relationship between the audience and the sponsors and you’ve got a far more effective vehicle.’

Responding to the Baton challenge, CanWest is scripting its weekend morning program around its Kid’s Club concept, complete with newsletter new this year already at circulation 40,000. The kids’ portion of CanWest’s $5 million promotion budget is more than $1 million, including producing the newsletter, media and on-air promotion, says CanWest vp programming and promotions Doug Hoover.

Global’s on-air approach, more fragmented than the Baton method, uses different kids each season to introduce programs and talk to the viewers, essentially because Hoover believes the environment ‘should be the icing’ and not an end unto itself. But he says the market is forcing broadcasters to find means of helping kids make their program decisions.

‘More services offering children’s programming means we have to do a bit more than just our own on-air promotions to tell them what’s out there,’ says Hoover. ‘As a business strategy, it’s become increasingly important that we try and grow our schedule demographically, in part because of fragmentation. The other thing that’s important for a company that intends to be in business a long time is to build an identity as early as possible.’

Establishing and maintaining an identity with the market before the onset of teletoon et al is key, but what may be a stronger pull factor is the upward trend in ad dollars, particularly for the techno-product-happy tween set of nine to 14 year olds. While advertising rates are fairly stable, both Ken Johnson, vp marketing and sales at Global and Sue Grimmer vp of sales at ytv, say the demand is skewing slightly older.

‘As the technology-driven brands come down and video and computer games come into the home environment as a matter of course, we’re seeing a slight trend in higher rates for that group and more demand for the programs,’ says Grimmer.

Johnson says the ad revenue bottom line for Global’s kids’ sked is seeing only a slight increase, but that most of the activity is a shift in strategy on the client side to reach the older demos. With its new feathers, Baton may be seeing the bulk of new advertisers this season, and could be drawing dollars from Fox back north of the border.

The technical side of the equation too is driving promotion initiatives. Both ytv and Family Channel are getting set to release Web sites, doing more of what Susan Ross, vp marketing for ytv, calls ‘evolving and extending the brand into the home.’

The competition for programming means marketing strategies for children are integrated into the whole realm of their experience, for instance, ytv’s Dark Night 4, a Halloween-grounded spook fest on Oct. 26.

‘If you’re a kids’ network, you really have to understand what’s important in a kid’s life,’ says Ross. ‘Holidays, anytime they’re not in school, is important.’

The strategy also applies at the local level. chum’s The New VR, sub base 1.5 million, is taking on Fox in the after-school market for the first time this year, running Wizard of Oz, Big Bad Beetleborgs and VR Troopers from 3:30 p.m. to 5 p.m., Monday through Friday, all wrapped around by VeRy Roger, a signature Citytv live-in-studio commentator featuring Roger Klein, a local personality popular with the younger crowd.

The motivation is part practical, part branding, says vr general manager Peggy Hebdon. Programming from the u.s. runs short, and with only four minutes of advertising allowed, there’s plenty of room for filler material.

‘For a while we had a lot of psas with bouncing cats but it got kind of boring.

‘This way we’ve got Canadian programming we can attribute to our required amount and a means of building and branding the station and the programming with the local audience, which opens us up to sponsorship and added-value options on the sales side.’

On the public broadcasting side, although producers say tvo and cbc are placing increased emphasis on getting the word out about their children’s programs, pubcaster execs say their focus remains on quality programming and alternative scheduling versus the promotions machine.

Adrian Mills, tvo creative head of children’s and youth programming, says corporate sponsorship is becoming a progressively easy and successful funding route for the network. Spar Aerospace underwriting Bill Nye the Science Guy and coproducing a subsequent classroom science series spin-off is an example of the kind of partnerships which are ‘more important to us than a few thousand dollars in one shot,’ he says.

At cbc, The Playground is being supported by a minimum of promotional material including ads in Today’s Parent and a poster campaign in libraries and daycare centers across the country. Although ytv has a bigger overall share of the two-to-11 market, The Playground is winning with the preschoolers through the week. This year five new programs will be opening in the weekday morning block, all supported without ad revenue.

According to Peter Moss, creative head of children’s programming at cbc, it’s ‘really contentious’ the amount of money that goes on at Global and Baton Saturday and Sunday mornings.

‘Fortunately, we’re not in that business. We rely much more on the ingenuity of independent production,’ says Moss, who projects that the 50/50 split of in-house/independent children’s program production will go up to about 25/75 over the next couple of years.

Next year’s launch of the 100% Canadian cbc sked will open up the afternoon slots currently filled with American sitcoms and open some windows for tween programming.

cbc executive director of arts and entertainment Phyllis Platt is already fielding scripts as well as a ‘great rush’ of coproduction proposals from Nickelodeon and Children’s Television Network, buoyed by the u.s. broadcasters’ new three hours of educational tv mandate.

The benefits of this increased promotional drive and, in some cases, extended windows, for children’s program producers is in part self-evident, the more windows equals more opportunities ratio.

But producer Ira Levy at Breakthrough Films, says this across-the-board drive for ratings and identity ideally plays out well on the beach at mipcom. The Adventures of Dudley the Dragon, which hits the magic 65-episode mark this year, premiered on ytv in a slot drawing 7,000 viewers, built to 44,000 after four months and 124,000 a year in, and although the ratings increase didn’t drive the price of the series up, international buyers are easier to woo with solid Canadian ratings onside, says Levy.

‘In Dudley’s case, the ratings in the u.s. are good too, so the reaction is that much more positive. The perception is that it’s been test-marketed in North America, and if it makes it there, it’s a viable product. It gives the international buyers a lot of confidence taking the program.’

Where teletoon will fit into the whole children’s landscape will take shape next September with the launch of it and its three analog counterparts in yet unidentified program packages. Family Channel director of programming Kevin Wright, doing double time on programming for teletoon until the service staffs up, says the animation channel is looking to do a bit of an alternative scheduling including an animated feature block on Saturday and Sunday mornings.

Wright is making no projections on the audience share teletoon could garner the first year out. The focus for teletoon will be where it is for all the private nets in the kids’ programming market – on defining a niche with the audience and developing an identity. ‘If we can come out of the blocks saying we’re teletoon – this is who we are and what we’re about, and people get it, that’s our yardstick for success the first year.’