TVKIDS
Kids’ media expert Emily Horgan joined the TV Kids Festival today to discuss tips for engagement and utilizing YouTube with pocket.watch’s Beck Canote and Kedoo Entertainment’s Olivier Bernard.
The Engagement Game panel, which featured some of Horgan’s intel on the performance of kids’ shows on Netflix, can be viewed in its entirety here.
Horgan recently unveiled a new report taking a deep dive into Netflix engagement data, exploring viewing across subgenres of action animation, comedy animation, fantasy girl-skew animation and preschool.
“YouTube IP preschool dominates, and YouTube IP within preschool has a really strong footprint,” Horgan said. “We’re here to talk about how all of these different platforms, touchpoints and data points can all swirl together.”
Horgan’s analysis also found strong demand for dialog-free comedy on Netflix, including Booba from Kedoo Entertainment, which has built a thriving business on distributing content to digital platforms, including YouTube. pocket.watch, meanwhile, has assembled a powerhouse stable of YouTube creators—notching up some 9 billion monthly views—and has been bringing that content out into the wider content marketplace.
Horgan asked Bernard, COO and co-founder of Kedoo, about the origins of Booba’s multiplatform success story. It was created as a digital-first brand, with an initial commission of five episodes. “Within two to three months, Booba did well,” he said. “We then created a full studio behind it with the full idea but still very focused on the digital. We were getting as much information as we could from the data and from the industry. It’s direct to consumer—you want to give them high-quality, entertaining [content] with a quick pace. If you want them to engage with the product, you need to keep them interested. You need to have a storyline, but you also need to have a pace toward that storyline.”
Season one consisted of 3.5-minute episodes before expanding to the more traditional 7 minutes “once we understood what to do and that it was a format for the wider industry,” Bernard said.
pocket.watch has carved a niche in the digital-first content business with its large network of creators. “We’re working with creators who have already proven themselves on the platform,” said Canote, manager of channel operations. “We have a digitally native product that we want to bring to build into a more premium digitally native product. We know that these people are going to keep creating, and that we can track their audiences almost in real time. We have the audience directly informing us on YouTube who they want to be watching and what they’re watching.”
Ryan Kaji is among the creator economy stars that have successfully crossed over to premium platforms—including via the Ryan and Friends Plus SVOD service. “We have a promise [to the parents]: this is a space you are choosing to pay for your kid to have access to; once they’re in, they’re going to find the things that they want to watch in a format that is completely tuned for what they’re looking for,” Canote said. “Highly thematic content, highly seasonal content that often pops into what we call our Mish Mashes, which are 22-minute episodes. They are custom animation and wraparounds, bringing you a curated compilation of the best videos with engaging interstitial things that are going to have a more TV-esque viewing experience, but the content is all digitally native. It feels like the things they are watching on YouTube, just put into a package that is brand safe, edited if needed to bring things out around ads and sponsors and put in a way where we know parents can trust that if their kids click on Ryan and Friends Plus, they’re going to want to stay on the platform, want to be watching their favorite creators and not running into some of the issues with a lack of brand safety.”
Bernard highlighted the crucial need to “be everywhere in order for your brand to be everywhere. If you are on broadcasters as well, it’s a plus. It benefits the brand, and it’s good for the consumers. But it’s not easy to be there because you still have people curating [these platforms]. You need to convince them that your product would be good for their platform.”
Canote added, “The walled gardens are walled gardens—people are subscribing to them for different needs. Hulu, Disney+ and Peacock are such important places to be. Eighty-plus percent of parents will subscribe to something their kids ask them for, but the lack of quality in the content is the number one reason they’ll eventually unsubscribe. Those other spaces have that proven hook. By getting into that garden, you start pairing those marketing opportunities up for kids’ content to appear on those kids’ shelves next to the shelves that their parents are looking at. That badge of availability and quality being recognized there gets you more in that mindset of marketing opportunities. You can’t 360 on your own. That stamp of authenticity and quality on YouTube content does still come at times from these traditional broadcasters and bigger names.”
Horgan asked the panelists about the role of data and how they’re using it in content decisions.
“Data is key,” Bernard said. “The first thing we did at Kedoo was put in eight servers to monitor YouTube. We monitor 350 million channels every five minutes.”
Bernard continued, “Each platform has their own silo. They have different audiences; therefore, you need to analyze the data of each platform and make sure that you’re actually answering for that audience of that platform. We don’t look at it in a global in a global way. We’re focusing on each platform and which audience within the platform. You need to have an overview of what the market does and where it goes. On the weekly, daily and quarterly analysis, you need to understand what’s happening on each platform.”
Tracking engagement via hours and minutes viewed is paramount in processing the data, Bernard explained.
“We also do get the boon of all the data points that YouTube gives to us from our creators themselves,” Canote said. “We balance the hard data with the experience of the creators.”
Horgan then asked the panelists to share their thoughts on what they’re learning from how kids engage with gaming.
“Gen Alpha, up to probably some of the younger millennials, have been playing Roblox for a long time,” Canote said. “When you give them the offering to access that content on another platform, they engage just as highly as they do with non-gaming videos from their favorite creators. It’s that all-encompassing experience, and ultimately, there’s something so social about gaming.”
Booba has five games, Bernard said, with some 150 million downloads. “Everybody is using gaming,” he noted. “If you’re a fan of the IP, you want to interact with it, you want to play with it. We’re going to continue on that on all our IPs. You’re reaching the same audience or another audience. You’re making them play with your IP. It’s very important.”
