Coalition Puts Quality Videos First

Some of the best children’s home videos--recognized for excellence by such groups as the American Library Assn. and the Parent’s Choice Foundation--never make it to the shelves of your local video store. Their independent producers simply lack the marketing dollars to get them there.

The Coalition for Quality Children’s Videos, a new nonprofit organization based in New Mexico, plans to change the status quo with a “two-pronged goal,” according to Executive Director Paula Miller: “To heighten public awareness of other quality programming and to make it readily available.”

To that end, the coalition has put together its “Kids First!” collection of 15 hard-to-find children’s videos for ages 5 to 12, from Children Circle’s “Maurice Sendak Library” to the Academy Award-winning animated short “Every Child.”

The collection has been launched at Barnes & Noble and Learningsmith stores on the East Coast; plans are under way to expand marketing westward. Meanwhile, the collection and other titles are available through the group’s “Kids First!” catalogue.

Describing the selection process, Miller said, “The videos must all be award winners; each must have been recognized by the ALA or some other source such as Children’s Video Report.”

After coalition “screening committees” view the videos, “we then conduct a focus group with several children,” Miller said. “It’s really the children who choose, in the final analysis.

“A lot of studios buy product based on what the box looks like,” she added. “Our criteria are content, high production values and how well the messages come across to children. And, obviously, repeatability and collectibility.”

Miller said the producers “are well taken care of” because the coalition buys “product from the producer at the regular rate that any other entity would pay.”

The group’s advisory board includes children’s media activist Peggy Charren, well known for her work with Action for Children’s Television. It also includes two video producers, but Ranny Levy, coalition president, noted that “we have no producers on the screening committees. We wanted producers’ voices to be heard, but felt it was important to be in a position where they would not be selecting product at all.”

The coalition’s efforts were given a boost in July when the group was awarded a $50,000 grant from National Video Resources, an initiative of the Rockefeller Foundation, to market and promote the collection.

“Retail and video stores in general are dominated by recent theatrical releases,” said Tim Gunn, National Video Resources director. “If (adults) have interest in diverse programming, you’re usually out of luck. It’s similar in children’s video--it’s dominated by the major studios, and conscientious parents are frustrated because they can’t easily find really good programming for their kids.”

The coalition “fits into one of our model distribution projects--innovative marketing approaches for videocassette. We think the strategy of putting together a collection of videos around a particular theme is one that might work for other kinds of video.

“If this proves successful,” he said, “other distributors might be encouraged to put together packages, say, of environmental films or videos about the African-American experience, or other subject matters. Then, customers coming into a video store will be attracted not to single titles that tend to get lost in that environment, but to a collection that they can respect and trust.”

Gunn said his organization will assess the results of the coalition’s marketing strategy and communicate them to independent producers and distributors in the field.

Catalogue information: (800) 331-6197.

Children’s Day: “Arts Heal L.A.,” a day of storytelling, music, songs and mime for children, will take place Aug. 30 from 1 to 5 p.m. at the Up Front Comedy Showcase in Santa Monica to benefit the St. Joseph Center in Venice. Presented by the nonprofit Live Arts Theatre Group. Admission is $5 or donations of school supplies, books and children’s clothing. Information: (310) 453-8501, (310) 319-3477.