• 

Toy unboxing videos serve a vast range of purposes for toy retailers. They engage consumers, enhance the brand’s appeal, and provide data about which toys are the most popular. The latest iterations add even another benefit, in that they contain purchase links to make it easy for children or their parents to buy the product being featured in the video, with a simple click. Consider Walmart’s videos for example. Each of them starts with the child doing the unboxing or playing with the toy announcing, “This is an advertisement.” But after that caution, the videos are totally fun, interactive, entertaining, and engaging. Young viewers can watch other kids take products out of boxes, play with them, and goof around with their friends. On Santa’s page on the Walmart site, they also can interact with Santa himself, who asks them about their preferences and the items on their holiday lists. Other pages similarly allow children to rate the products they have played with, virtually, and collect their most liked options on a list that gets sent automatically to their parents. That list, naturally enough, also features direct links to Walmart’s purchase page for the desired toy. Such selections also can tell Walmart what kinds of sales trends it might expect. However, due to the careful privacy restrictions in place when it comes to young consumers, it cannot retain the list data and link them to purchases, which would enable it to determine specifically if a particular child’s list prompted a particular parent’s purchase. The trends reflected in the aggregated data are significant though, and they suggest the substantial effectiveness of these sorts of interactive, entertaining, and novel communications with consumers.

Source: Joan Verdon, Forbes, December 21, 2019