Sprouterrific Playdate

Image from Facebook

Madeline Fretz - Back in 2008, Sprout was available in over fifty million homes and cable providers such as Time Warner Cable were begging for it, but was still a small channel with a pretty low budget. Compare it to the larger budget they had in later years. To promote the channel, Sprout Please was launched, encouraging families to request Sprout in their areas. But that's another story.

Also in 2008, Sprout launched the Sprout Mall Tour, probably also to promote the channel to viewers who were either (or both?) new to the name or to get them to request the channel in their areas.

Pictures and videos of the Mall Tour are still up on sites like YouTube and Facebook, so give me a favor and go check them out for yourselves! A few of these pictures (if not all?) are from a Facebook page from 2010.

Image from Facebook

 Here, kids could get their picture taken with Barney the Dinosaur, a regular of Sprout programming, in front of an inflatable background featuring the Sprout logo and a link to SproutOnline.com, and upload their photos to a website called SproutMallTour.com. Please note that the above picture says SproutOnline.com instead of SproutMallTour.com.

A popular part of this Mall Tour was that kids could get to meet Chica and a Sunny Side Up Show host in front of an inflatable replica of the Sunshine Barn and tell the weather. Families could also upload videos of their weather reports to SproutMallTour.com.

Now for something I may have talked about in a previous post on this blog, and I'm deeply sorry if I did. In 2008 and 2009, Sprout held a Preschool Weather Reporter contest in which they would select a lucky kid who took part in the Mall Tour Weather Reports and have them tell the weather live on The Sunny Side Up Show. The winners ended up being Tampa's Mikey Letts in 2009 and St. Louis' Maddyx Poulin in 2010, but I'm pretty sure Daniel, the boy with Liz and Chica in one of the pictures, was the winner of another Weather Reporter Contest in 2011.

While kids waited to meet their favorite characters, they were treated to a variety of characters. In addition, there was a television screen that played clips from Sprout shows such as Wiggly Waffle.

The Mall Tour kept going, touring different cities across the US, until at least 2010 or 2011.

Anyways, this was a pretty nice way to promote the Sprout brand to newcomers. They should've kept this up and done similar things!

Click here to tour different cities on the Parents and Kids Share Together forum!