CREATIVE SHOWCASE

Firefox compatible

Client: Sesame Street Workshop

With the many advancements being made in technology, we realized that we had a strong opportunity to harness the power of the internet as a medium to deliver content to children in ways that allowed for deeper interaction than ever before.

In addition to hundreds of games and thousands of videos on SesameStreet.org, we've also added new innovative features, including playlists (a lineup of seven theme-based videos and games), PlaySAFE (an optional mode that secures a child's online experience by preventing them from navigating away from the site) and child-friendly navigation.

With more and more preschoolers online, we felt it was our responsibility to create engaging and educational content for our target audience. In creating the new SesameStreet.org, a team of executives, producers, creative directors and educational experts worked together to develop ideas about how to design a meaningful interactive experience that is also fun!

We spent two years developing this site at a cost of $14 million. During this period, we conducted extensive research with approximately 100 children throughout the greater New York area.

Based on that research, we made significant changes to the site's navigational features. For example, we learned that young children often experience difficulty when trying to position the tiny tip of an arrow cursor on something to select it, since their motor skills are still in the process of developing. To make navigation easier, we developed a special star cursor and large child-friendly navigation icons. Any part of the star cursor can be placed on an object to click and select. We also learned from our research that children need overt visual indicators to determine which objects are clickable. To help guide them in this process, we added sparkles that appear whenever the star cursor is paused on a clickable area.

The results of our new website exceeded our expectations. From our field research, we knew that the site had high appeal with three-, four- and five-year-olds. However, when we previewed SesameStreet.org at the BlogHer conference for female bloggers in San Francisco, the response was overwhelmingly positive. We were thrilled to learn that adults were just as eager to explore the new site as the children with whom we had tested. The bloggers especially enjoyed viewing classic video clips that brought back memories of their own childhood.

While there is not anything we would change about the research and development of the new site, we are planning to add new game and video content on an ongoing basis.

We launched with approximately 3,000 Sesame Street videos, and are planning to add many more in the next few years. After nearly 40 years of production, Sesame Street has an incredibly rich and extensive library of classic and current material. We hope to make thousands more of these timeless clips available so that they can continue to be enjoyed by fans of all ages.

SesameStreet.org is a safe and engaging interactive experience that makes learning fun for young children and their parents. Every day on the SesameStreet.org homepage, a live-action muppet host welcomes users to the site and introduces the featured theme of the day. In many ways this online experience extends the relationship that children already have with their Sesame Street friends on the show, and it's all free!
-- Makeda Mays, director of education, Sesame Workshop

Creative Showcase is meant to be a teaching tool and an inspiration for our readers. We comment only on creative that we really love. Our panelists discuss what makes it great, but if they feel there were missed opportunities that would have made it better, we invite them to mention those. And finally, we seek out a wide range of opinions that reflect the marketplace for the panel, in order to provide constructive, useable feedback for agencies, clients and others involved in these creative pieces.

The Sesame Street site is a smash for both parents and children. Offering a wide range of interactive games and art projects -- including coloring book pages and multi-media educational tools -- makes old favorites current and accessible for a new generation. The color palette, while consistent with the Sesame Street of yesteryear, delightfully varies from "death by primary color" and offers gradation and range. This gives the site a more contemporary feel that parents like myself are sure to appreciate. The site offers something for everyone, whether it is a child interested in learning to count with The Count or a parent interested in donating to child-related causes. The redesign is ambitious and should be applauded. I especially enjoyed the Sesame Street character sections and the "My House" personalization tool, which will allow children and parents to localize their favorite content to their very own pages in a way that social network users will easily understand. My only concern is that while it wisely offers a low bandwidth mode, the site really does require high bandwidth for maximum functionality. My guess is that as the children come in droves, the kink will be worked out. So glad to see this online. I plan to have my family tune in/log on!
-- Lana McGilvray, vice president of marketing, Datran Media

Sesame Street has a strong brand going into this venture, so it would be hard-pressed not to succeed. Even without that advantage, this would still be a great site for kids and parents. Last night I tried the site out for the first time with my 2 ½-year-old daughter. She likes cartoon and game sites like BozTheBear.com and others, so I thought she'd like this too. And I was right. In fact, it was hard to pull her away from the computer. (Note to parents: Don't try this right before bedtime.) The graphics are great, the navigation is very intuitive and the sound effects are engaging enough, but not cheesy. It was wise to use the same characters and voices too. My only beef is that with a DSL connection, there's a little lag for each game to download; that's not a great thing for a squirmy, slightly ADD kid who's trying to bang the mouse around. To their credit, the site gives parents a question to ask their kids while each game loads.

Still, SesameStreet.org is a wonderful site for kids and a great way to teach, interact and play with your kids while getting them comfortable with rich media on the web -- a geeky father's dream.
-- Matt Wright, director of product development, How Stuff Works

The tough task of writing a review for the iconic brand of Sesame Street's new website melted away when I included my six-year-old daughter Grace to put the site to the test. The site's primary target audience is clearly focused on young kids, so watching Grace interact with the site was much more informative than my initial attempts to be a big kid on the site. Here is what I learned: Sesame Street did its homework. When it comes to good content, kids are far more patient than adults. Grace watched the first two minutes of the homepage Flash animation of Bert introducing the elements of the site. She and her three-year-old sister Emma began talking back to the screen and getting very animated about all the recognizable characters. Where do you think Grace clicked first? Games, of course. Kids love games and smartly, SesameStreet.org has "Games" as the intuitive first choice in the top navigation.

Grace played three games for 10 minutes before her younger sister finally won the battle of moving on to see a video of Elmo. Hearing "Elmo, Elmo, Elmo" for 10 minutes can be persuasive. As a parent and interactive marketer, I always interact with sites in a focused way between myself and the computer. With SesameStreet.org, I really appreciated the ways that it helped me bond with my girls. In each of the games, the site features a "Parent Tip" with great questions to ask your child while they're playing the game. In Snuffy's Safari game, I was reminded to ask Grace which ocean animals had scales. Other questions led to great discoveries throughout the game. Very few websites can capture the attention of three people gathered around a laptop at the same time for a solid 45 minutes. Talk about some amazing metrics for engagement!  Alright, it's a sunny Sunday, and we've all been sucked into video upon video of great content and games that just won't stop. I need to take Sesame Street's advice and get my kids out of their pajamas and outside!
-- Ryan Buchanan, CEO, eROI