How brands secure long dwell-time with families at play
If your brand wants to reach families with children under 14, Boomerang’s Family Play and Leisure Centre networks are some of the most effective environments in which to achieve this.
Family play or entertainment centres are typically purpose-built spaces on the edge of town, or connected to a mall, designed for safety, convenience, and repeat visits. The sweet-spot age range is 1-9 years (approx 40% of the market), but family play centres are designed to appeal to a range of age groups from toddlers at soft play to progressively older children having fun in activity zones, trampolining and clip-and-climb centres.
Families spend an average of 90-120 minutes per visit, with parents often based in the purpose-built café areas while children play nearby. Boomerang’s two-week reach in this environment is 1.4m – that’s significant for such a well-defined audience. For brands on our Family Play DOOH network, that’s meaningful dwell time, not just drive-by footfall.
According to TGI, families with kids in the household are 31% more likely to have seen DOOH at play centers in the last week – more impressive than families seeing any type of supermarket OOH in the last week, at just 12% more likely than the population.
DOOH in play centres is an opportunity to influence, since parents aren’t just watch their kids and scrolling their phones – they socialise, network with other parents, juggle babies (in addition to their older kids), and increasingly even spend longer there working remotely during school holidays.
With UK parents spending £7bn+ annually on children’s activities and experiences, Boomerang’s D6s in these environments are a highly efficient media for reaching household decision-makers in a relaxed, receptive mindset.
Leisure centres however offer a complementary but slightly different dynamic. Often more centrally located and community-led, they host swimming lessons, sports clubs and classes, with parents again often waiting in cafés, while children take part. Some now also include climbing walls or trampolines, creating natural crossover with playcentre behaviour. Crucially, these venues attract repeat weekly visits due to the club and lesson nature of activities, meaning brands benefit from frequency as well as dwell time – reach of parents via our DOOH network is 600,000 per two-weeks, so making this an influential addition to the Family Play network, should a brand want to reach more families.
The multi-faceted family-friendly nature of leisure centres delivers an even greater likelihood of families having seen DOOH advertising there in the past week – they’re 48% more likely to have done so, when compared to the general population.
For media planners who may not yet have kids themselves, these spaces might be easy to overlook. But combined playcentre and leisure centre media opportunities (which include product sampling, ambient and experiential, as well as D6s) offer brands a rare chance to reach parents in real life, in family mode, with time on their hands.
It’s a near-undiluted audience engagement opportunity in a habitual moment, where modern family life happens.
Article by Josh Bingham
