Disney Eyes Mommy Demo on Web

Just as its latest Pixar-produced blockbuster hits theaters, and Hannah Montana and the Jonas Brothers continue to rule the kids TV landscape, Disney is looking to go hard after an older demo on the Web.Disney Online is set to announce today the completion of its acquisition of a collection of parenting Web sites run by the financially distressed Canadian media company Kaboose, purchased for $18.4 million in April. But the company isn’t specifically branding them as Disney channels. Instead, it plans to bundle Kaboose.com, BabyZone.com, AmazingMoms.com and ParentZone.com with its own DisneyFamily.com and FamilyFun.com sites in what it’s calling the Disney Online Mom and Family Portfolio. “We were really looking to expand our presence with the mom and family demographic,” said Emily Smith, vp, Disney Online. Smith believes that with the combination of its own family properties (which reached 2.6 million unique visitors in April, per comScore) and Kaboose’s (3.6 million uniques), Disney can claim to be the biggest player in the moms category on the Web.That should make the new portfolio attractive to mom-targeting advertisers, which are rapidly growing in number, according to Brad Davis, senior vp, West Coast multimedia leader for Disney Online. “Moms were somewhat late to arrive on the online scene but have definitely ramped up their time” recently, he said. “The big ad categories have always targeted moms, but until recently the share of spending online has lagged the market.”Sean Black, founder and president of the New Jersey-based JL360 Media (who’s experienced in marketing to kids and moms online), called Disney’s decision to maintain the Kaboose brands “smart as hell…This extends their opportunities to reach a segment of parents that is very different than what they’ve been able to reach before.”Plus, keeping the Kaboose sites should enable Disney to serve a deeper pool of advertisers, according to Black. "Disney is not the easiest property to buy," he said. "You need to spend an enormous amount of money to get share of voice on their properties. Kaboose opens things up to those brands than are spending $25,000 and $50,000."By 2012, forecasts eMarketer, there will be 39.6 million women with children on the Web, up from 34.2 million in ’07. It’s led to an explosion of mom-aimed communities sites and mommy bloggers, but no clear leader has emerged, according to Smith. Disney rival Nickelodeon already has pushed onto this turf. In February 2008, it launched Parents Connect Network, a collection of smaller mom-aimed sites and blogs vetted by Nick staffers. But Disney is also looking to fight off recent challenges from mega ad networks that don’t necessarily focus on the family demographic, but can offer size and clout. “Recently, ad networks like Glam have been rolling all these smaller sites to create one big number,” noted Smith. “But ad networks are not quite what they were a year ago.”The thinking is that advertisers are now looking for both scale and premium when they target moms online. That doesn’t mean Disney won’t emulate the network model to some degree. Smith said the company is open to both more acquisitions and also selling ads for smaller mom properties, just as Nick does.In fact, Kaboose recently launched an ad network similar to Nickelodeon’s, which it will continue. It includes sites such as the popular kids activity-themed mommyandme.com.One particular Kaboose site, BabyZone, should also give Disney more traction among the expecting and new-mom demographic, not traditionally the company’s strength. “That opens us up to a broader category of users and advertisers who we can now super-serve,” said Davis.

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Disney Eyes Mommy Demo on Web

Mike Shields

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