Learning from cartoons

Hazy-eyed this morning, I switched on the TV and soothingly stumbled across CBeebies and Tommy Zoom’s environmental battle against evil Polluto, and his Pollutank. It’s brilliant. A simple, entertaining cartoon for kids, teaching ecological principles. Green = good. Polluting = bad.

Cartoons are by no means a new platform for educating children (Sesame Street, Captain Planet, Pigeon Street, to name a few). But can we complex, convoluted advertisers learn a lesson here?

New research from the Disney Channel and NOP highlights that 89% of a 2,000 adult sample want their kids to grow up caring about the environment. Which is probably why Disney, The Early Learning Centre and CBeebies are at the cutting edge of ‘green’ children’s programming.

Watch them? As others talk about, here, here and here, when communicating ‘green’, appealing to simple value systems that consumers already hold such as love, respect, good and bad, is a great way to talk to a set of consumers turned off by terms such as 'eco'. CBeebies is great for nursing a hangover too ;-)