Things are looking sunnier than ever for Reading Rainbow.
After the show's Kickstarter hit its $1 million goal in just 11 hours, the creators set their sights on a new butterfly in the sky: $5 million. With one week left, the Kickstarter is currently at $4 million in pledges from more than 83,000 backers.
We caught up with Reading Rainbow co-founder and CEO Mark Wolfe (who wrote and directed the Kickstarter video) and chief marketing advisor Teri Rousseau to find out how they've remained authentic to their brand while reinventing Reading Rainbow for a new generation of digital natives.
AdFreak: Tell me a bit about the brand after Reading Rainbow left public television.
Rousseau: The original mission when LeVar and Mark formed RR Kids was to bring back Reading Rainbow for this generation and LeVar very much felt that the way to bring that back was through digital technology. Our original app was for the Kindle Fire and iPad, and it went really well. We had kids reading over 150,000 books a week. It was a top-downloaded app.
Wolfe: I think we're just lucky that parents are looking for something. Kids want to spend time in front of an electronic device. When television was the medium, kids wanted to be in front of it, and now it's a tablet. You can't mitigate that; you just have to utilize that as best as possible. Parents are confronted with so many choices, and not many of them are positive choices.
Rousseau: We recognize we're competing against the Angry Birds of the world. One of our special elements in the app is our aesthetic. We've developed these beautiful islands where you can discover the books on: Animal Island, Awesome People Island (that's the nonfiction), National Geographic Island. It's fun to just explore that world and it becomes very game-like. Children want fun. Parents want quality content. That's a challenge and that’s a challenge to any family brand: making sure you meet the mark with parents and children both. We had to make it very interactive while making sure we maintained the principles of the linear show.
So preserving the credibility of the Reading Rainbow brand was key in the creation of the app?
Rousseau: We were very careful with our development. We did do focus testing with both kids and parents. Our mission was bringing the brand back for digital and there's no doubt it resonates with today's families. At the same time, we didn't want to disappoint anyone’s memory of what it was.
You had an existing fan base from another generation that you didn’t want to alienate.
Rousseau: Those classic episodes still hold up and are available on iTunes. Teachers still use them in the classroom. But I think the opportunity to bring back such a beloved and icon brand has been a once and a lifetime opportunity. Now we know we did it right. We've proved that Reading Rainbow works in this new form, and what we needed to do to bring it to the next level was get help from the community.
What's the next level beyond the app?
Rousseau: We were hearing, "Is it on Android?" and, "Is it in classrooms?" Teachers were finding it themselves and paying for the app out of their own pocket. We needed to figure out a way to bring it to them in their own classrooms, and give access to schools free of charge for those in need.
So you created the Kickstarter campaign, and it’s been wildly successful.