MIPJunior Panel Showcases Youth Media Trends

Lea Karam, founder and CEO of Mindscope, led a MIPJunior panel conversation with the BBC’s Patricia Hidalgo, pocket.watch’s Chris M. Williams and Animaj’s Greg Dray on the best strategies for connecting with Gen Alpha and Gen Z.

Karam is a behavioral scientist, strategist and founder of Mindscope, a consultancy dedicated to understanding emerging audience trends. She discussed meeting the fast-changing needs of young audiences with Hidalgo, director of BBC Children’s & Education; Williams, founder and CEO of pocket.watch; and Dray, co-founder of Animaj.

“Kids are becoming creators and AI is playing a big role in this new ecosystem,” Karam said on the key shifts in the children’s media business.

“It’s critical to refocus as much as we can as an industry on building and creating for kids,” Dray said. “We focus on the consumer. We are going after white spaces, like sports-related programming for kids and families. We are focusing on the audience.”

Pocket.watch is a key part of the kids’ creator economy ecosystem. “We founded on the thesis that characters and IP are coming through the most competitive environment in the history of time for content,” Williams said. “They’re competing with 20 million videos uploaded every single day and 4.2 billion videos on that library on YouTube. As creators with millions of fans globally who love them, it is not love, it is not timing, it’s magic. It’s the same type of magic that would lead to massive success for a movie or a TV show, except in an environment that’s insanely more competitive. So, the fundamental thesis is that if it is succeeding as a character or IP or content brand on that platform, our company then takes that and extends it into franchise economics by making shows that appear on Hulu, Disney+ or Peacock or other things or by selling branded products in retail stores like Walmart and Target based on those brands. The competitive platform of YouTube has already shown us that it’s going to succeed. So, now, I take it off a shelf of 4.2 billion things and put it on a shelf with 5,000 or 500, and it generally performs to the relative success. That part of the model has not changed at all.”

Hidalgo is traversing this environment from a public-broadcaster perspective. “We are in a really interesting time,” Hidalgo said. “We have always done what’s most required of this audience. If you think about it, the biggest shows for children are actually those that are both highly entertaining and highly educational. We have to think about how we use this new era to connect with this audience and do good at the same time.”

Discussing the role of YouTube in young viewers’ lives, Williams said the platform “intentionally created good principles for content. It was actually a fair balance between learning and entertainment. That does open up and incentivize” more educational content on the platform, he said.

“I’m absolutely convinced that the next big children’s IP will come from a platform like Roblox,” Dray said. “This is the place where kids are spending an increasing amount of time. At some point, we’re going to see the same phenomenon on Roblox. Today, on Roblox, it is still relatively complicated to find brands with franchise potential beyond Roblox. But clearly, we are seeing some absolutely astonishing numbers. From my point of view, the next children’s IP is likely to come from a platform like Roblox.

Williams added, “Another thing we love about things like Roblox is that it is, in fact, a production studio. You have to look at it that way because the content being fueled and distributed through those Roblox experiences is fully bringing that loop together. We have creators who really lean into Roblox. And it’s not just about playing the Roblox game; it’s creating stories within those Roblox universes as if it’s a production studio. That’s driving people back to Roblox and then YouTube.”

“It’s fundamental to match that behavior, but also understand how they move between formats,” Karam said. “Usually, it’s not about the format. It’s about the benefit or the motivation that they seek from it as well. They want to play, connect with people and express themselves. It’s about tapping into that and building your IP around that as well.”

“This is not the future, this is the present,” Dray said.

“From our research, parents are not that worried about the screens—it’s what they’re on on the screens,” Hidalgo said. “Traditional broadcasters were always speaking to children. We have changed that at the BBC. We’re now speaking to parents because we know those parents need to hear from us. They really need us. They’re lost. What is the right program for my child when he’s 3 and he’s starting to speak? We launched a brand, CBeebies Parenting. CBeebies is a TV channel for preschoolers. Now, we are also a brand for parents. So, we talk to parents. We have advice for parents. We actually help them navigate and understand all the different moments of development of their children; when media, storytelling and content are good for them; and where they can find it.”

Williams added, “Just because something may look different than what we grew up with, doesn’t inherently make it bad. If it doesn’t look like Sesame Street, it doesn’t mean it’s bad for kids. We have to find the balance, as you originally described, between that entertainment value and that education. Parents shouldn’t feel shamed when their kids enjoy something because it has some attributes that are really good and some that they might perceive as more pure entertainment. As millennial parents, and now that we start to see Gen Z parents, they are going to understand that differentiation.”

“It’s really about getting technology and human intelligence to work hand in hand because technology is built by humans for humans,” Karam said. “It’s utilizing those platforms to connect.”

The session wrapped with Karam asking the panelists for their visions of what the sector looks like five years from now.

”As someone who is always trying to be out front before everybody else, it is the most opaque right now because of one thing, and that is AI,” Williams said. “From my most optimistic perspective, it empowers a new generation of creators to tell stories in production values that they weren’t able to tell before. I’ve never been more optimistic and absolutely terrified all at the same time. It does create an opaqueness for what those three to five views look like.”

Hildalgo said, “I am very hopeful that we’re going to start using AI for good, and we are all going to make sure that whatever we do, it’s a fantastic tool. What we can actually achieve will be incredible. I can’t wait to see what children start creating.”

Dray is similarly upbeat about the potential for AI and other new technologies to empower creators and audiences.