Kids represent an important demographic to marketers because in addition to their own purchasing power (which is considerable) they influence their parents’ buying decisions. According to YTV Kids and Tweens Report, kids can influence many of the family decisions. For example, they can influence breakfast choices in 97% of the time, or their opinion matters in clothing purchases (95% of the time) and computer game purchases in 76% of the times.

Parents are also willing to buy more for their kids because of trends such as smaller family size, dual incomes and postponing having children until later in life which results in more disposable income. Moreover, guilt can also play a role in spending decisions as time-stressed parents substitute material goods for time spent with their kids.

As a result, industry spending on advertising for children has exploded over the past two decades. In the United States alone, companies spent over $20 billion on advertising which is more than double of what they spent a decade ago.

Because of such high demand and its market potentials, producers are always looking for new ways to market these products. Among many marketing techniques, TV commercials that hold the attention of children who view them is considered to be the most important marketing toTo promote sales, a marketing research firm has hired a psychologist to conduct a series of experiments to shed light on advertising aspect of commercial TVs and to compare the influence of commercials for different types of products.

Question:

In the first phase of experiment, the psychologist randomly selects 100 kids between the age of 4 and 10 and shows them a 60-second commercial TV for a kid’s product to get their attention span. The data for attention span (in seconds) is shown in Excel File named “commercials”. As a research assistant you are asked to:

1. Describe the problem background, objective of the study, identify the type and scale of the variable used in this study.
2. Use the tools you learned in class to summarize the descriptive statistics in a table and interpret your results.
3. Calculate the probability that a time span for a kid will be greater than 45 seconds if the average time span of watching TV and the population standard deviation of the time for all kids in the U.S. is exactly equal to the ones obtained from the sample.
4. Calculate the minimum time span time for watching commercial if a kid is at the bottom 5 percent? Use information provided in question 3.

Time Span for a TV Commercial:
28,34,20,44,37,46,43,40,57,36,17,27,60,28,29,50,24,31,37,43,36,40,20,23,33,60,58,49,55,18,53,54,36,58,40,34,42,32,43,50,43,45,27,38,30,34,27,48,58,29,30,24,41,18,22,29,44,46,39,53,58,60,22,28,53,47,38,41,53,57,33,44,27,29,54,37,49,29,55,36,60,46,41,36,27,55,19,33,45,60,55,51,32,38,47,54,58,49,30,50.