News Analysis - Super Group

Super. - advocates for exceptional education

Toy World spoke with founding director, Aaron Lipman, of Creative kids' marketing agency Super., about how the company can help toy companies connect with kids and families in a landscape where traditional media is increasingly diverting away from conventional advertising.

At its core, Super. is an award-winning creative group of services that connects brands with kids, young people and families through thoughtful, topical campaigns that focus on exchanging a brand's currency (time/ conversation/advocacy) to create deeper engagement and enable a more meaningful impact. Many of our experiential and educational campaigns centre on skills development, both life skills and educational.

Life skills might be cooking, creative learning or financial literacy. Essentially, skills that schools deprioritise due to limitations within the National Curriculum or lack of funding. Meanwhile, educational is linked directly to school learning and the curriculum. We have successfully mapped hundreds of brands to the National Curriculum by breaking down a brand or product's values and finding a relevant area or opportunity within the curriculum or school environment where we can create a benefit for teachers and pupils.

The campaigns we create can be mapped to timed activities, hands-on time with products (sampling) or time spent watching and engaging with content. Multiplied by our network of 5k+ UK registered schools and nurseries, we’re able to create campaigns that can generate over 1m hours of engagement or hands-on time with products. This generates fantastic opportunities to create positive conversations, which can be PR-ed regionally or nationally under our newly established Super. PR division.

As society shifts, the government and schools will adapt towards a new AI era. Learning tools and toys will therefore need to focus on two types of products: those integrating AI or those that help children develop skills that support human interaction and emotional intelligence. We’ve seen the toy industry do this before when the government pushed schools to focus more on STEM. As a result, many toy brands started to develop STEM skills-related products and promote them as educational.

Working with a company that has schools' database and partnership experience at its core when planning and executing campaigns has many advantages. Understanding the insights and behaviours of this community has enabled us to marry brands with schools, ensuring that the engagement fit is right, compliant and that the balance between educational and marketing creates fans, not cynics.

We’ve worked on a wide range of objectives, from product sampling, launching new IP, driving traffic to online destinations such as Roblox, to creating behaviour change campaigns. We have a wealth of knowledge in how to develop a campaign that will be successful and, in many cases, award-winning. We work with a curated network of senior educators, ensuring quality control over the content we create, overseen by an experienced team which ensures the marketing focus remains embedded, whilst acting as a brand ambassador for our clients and guardians for teachers, pupils and families.

Probably the biggest catalyst for increased interest in our services, is the way kids consume content. How do brands reach kids and families in a world where traditional media is shifting away from advertising? This is where Super. can play an important role.

Super. offers clients a range of measurable and cost-effective, creative marketing and PR services that enable them to reach huge audiences and deliver real ROI through hands-on time with brands and products. The ability to create good content around a brand or product enables us to present it to a core audience that will see the benefits and will, in turn, interact and react as a brand fan.