Digital-First Strategies Charted at TV Kids Summer Festival

Offering two very different perspectives on creating YouTube content, 9 Story Media Group’s Elianne Friend and digital-native outfit TheSoul Publishing’s Francesco Miceli took part in a TV Kids Summer Festival session today moderated by Emily Horgan.

Horgan, an independent kids’ media consultant, led the discussion with Friend, VP of digital and distribution at 9 Story Media Group, now part of Scholastic Entertainment, and Miceli, head of content distribution partnerships at TheSoul Publishing, in a session you can watch on-demand here.

TheSoul Publishing is firmly entrenched in the creator economy space. reaching more than 2 billion followers across social-media platforms. 9 Story, meanwhile, began looking at YouTube almost a decade ago and is now producing specifically for the platform. “With YouTube dominating 80 percent of the market, it’s something we just can’t ignore,” Friend said. “Our digital-first content slate has many products underway because we must be in charge of our own destiny and meet kids where they are. We are first rolling it out [on YouTube] but also have in mind to put it on our AVOD platforms such as Tubi, Roku, Peacock, Pluto and the rest of the gamut. We’re really excited to produce for these platforms.”

With discoverability being such a huge challenge, projects are being developed at 9 Story with the view to “breaking through the noise on YouTube.” The company collaborated with HappyNest Entertainment, Paris Hilton’s 11:11 Media and Scholastic on Paris & Pups, launching this fall. “This is brand-new IP with built-in discoverability due to Paris’s reach. We’re tapping into her celebrity muscle as a millennial mom. Paris’s family content consistently outperforms on social with over 800 million impressions.”

Miceli then talked about how TheSoul Publishing is approaching the discoverability challenge. “We adopt a data-driven approach. We like to be very fast in jumping onto new trends. The online world has a different type of cycle compared to the one in more traditional media. So, you need to be very fast, agile, analyze trends, jump on them quickly, pivot when needed. It’s also very important to work on packaging. You don’t just need to produce great content, you need to be able also to package it correctly, starting from thumbnails and using the metadata. It provides users with the right amount of information to be able to discover your content and to cross-promote your content.”

Topics that resonate in YouTube content include sibling relationships, songs and science, Friend said.

The conversation then moved to understanding analytics. “This is the beauty of working on YouTube,” Horgan said. “It’s one of the most powerful things about the platform.”

Miceli talked about the importance of testing thumbnails to attract audiences, with bright colors and action being key. “It’s also about analyzing CTR. And you can’t just leave the content there and hope that it will perform as it is. You need to be able to refine your strategy over time. There is a process of trial and error.”

There are lots of KPIs to keep an eye on, with Miceli highlghting views and watch time as the most important ones, along with changes in subscriber numbers, audience retention and average view duration, and, with shorts, engaged views.

Friend boiled her KPIs down to watch time, click-through rate and average view duration. “It all comes down to how they’re finding the content and if they’re staying. Shorts is a great driver to find the content, not [for] big monetization. Every view is valued differently. Do you want wide viewership because you’re building a consumer products program? Do you want a deep viewership in the U.S. because you really need high CPMs or RPMs? It depends on what the goal is for creating the content for YouTube. It’s motivated by so many different factors. We apply different factors for different properties that have waterfall effects associated with them. Subscription is just a vanity metric. It’s not really what’s driving us. Kids don’t really subscribe to so much. They watch what’s suggested and served up to them. They’re not getting subscription alerts. We do a consistent job of programming on the platform because we are constantly feeding that beast with new content and also pivoting once we get the data in.”

The panelists also discussed the ins and outs of creating shorts. “They have incredible reach, but the RPMs are considerably lower,” Miceli said.

“Shorts are also a way for us, as we’re a more traditional company, seeding an idea in a cost-effective manner, understanding if there’s an appetite,” Friend said. “Potentially those shorts can grow into longer form episodes, can go through our more traditional premier pipeline, the Brown Bag pipeline. Shorts work for us to get awareness in our YouTube channels, but also to inform our more traditional pipeline. So, we can use it in both ways.”

Friend added, “Shorts strung together in longer compilations can then be put on some of our AVOD platforms, and [we] monetize them that way.”

Horgan then asked the panelists about monetizing digital content outside of the YouTube window.

“AVOD is a great way to monetize,” Friend noted. “We are in the FAST channels space. It costs money to be on those platforms. So, again, you can make money, but there is still an outlay. Whereas on the AVODs, you deliver and you create artwork, and there are costs associated with it, but not monthly hosting costs. So, FAST channels are more prohibitive in that sense and a bit more challenging with kids’ advertising. But we are in all those spaces. We have to be where the kids are. You have to bet in all of those places, some are more costly than others, but we’re everywhere.”

The session closed with the panelists giving their advice to others in the ecosystem navigating this space.

“Breaking through the noise is what it’s all about,” Friend said. “We are trying to identify projects with certain differentiators or competitive advantages. Content with an existing fan base. Brand-new content with promotional muscle. Content that fills a white space and serves maybe another business line in your company. For us, obviously, it’s publishing, as part of the Scholastic family. Identifying legacy IP that can be strengthened as a franchise or reboot on a digital platform is something that a more traditional company can focus on if they have really strong IP. Those are all things that help break through the noise. It’s a combination of still creating great platform content for kids on the platform, but realizing you’re creating it for a platform. You’ve got to lean into the data. Doing it in a silo with what you think is a good idea or what worked in the past for development teams, if you are not looking at data, you are poorly misguided. So, it’s combining all the elements that I just mentioned and being able to pivot. It can’t be a two-year development process. You’ve got all these episodes written and produced, you put them on, and then you’re like, Oh no, that didn’t work, and you don’t have any wiggle room to pivot. Part of your distribution strategy [should be] dropping episodes with the idea that you can refine later.”

Miceli added, “You need to be fast, agile and data-driven.”