TV Kids Festival Spotlights Preschool Trends

Serious Kids’ Genevieve Dexter, Jetpack Distribution’s Dominic Gardiner, Dandelooo’s Emmanuèle Pétry-Sirvin and CAKE’s Daniel Bays participated in a lively discussion on catering to preschoolers as day two of the TV Kids Festival opened today.

Watch the entire session, moderated by Chelsea Regan, managing editor of TV Kids, here. It opened with Regan asking the panelists what a preschool show needs to stand out today amid the considerable volume of content available on the market for that demo.

“Interesting characters that are touching, that kids can identify with, interesting stories, surprising situations [and] empowered characters” top the list for Pétry-Sirvin, partner and producer at Dandelooo. “The fact that there’s more competition doesn’t change that. You just have to be better at all of these points.”

Dexter, founder and CEO of Serious Kids and Eye Present, said the answer depends on perspective—that of the child audience, or the “gatekeepers” delivering the content—and the territory. “For example, if you’re trying to get a property into China, the preference is for certain types of animation. It tends to be CG, with very cute characters. Whereas if you’re trying to get into the U.K., we perhaps like things to be a little quirkier. Each market tends to be quite different.”

Gardiner, CEO of Jetpack Distribution, added, “A lot of shows look quite similar—derivative. I think people need to take more risks to make something that, if you put it in a lineup with other shows, will look different from the others. Otherwise, we end up with just a cookie-cutter solution that doesn’t excite anyone. It has to look exciting.”

“Kids nowadays are presented with a big wall of content,” noted Bays, VP of development at CAKE. “They have to pick out your show from all the noise. It’s really important to be visually distinctive. We’ve seen an increase in demand for 3D content for preschoolers, and I think it comes down to that visually distinctive wall of content thing. As Emmanuèle said, you’ve got to do the basics right first. Then you can take those familiar themes and, as Dominic was saying, find a new spin, something different to do with the same formula. This audience is ready to be challenged. You can give them exciting, new things if you’re willing to take that risk.”

Regan asked the panelists about the role of digital extensions for preschool brands. “We need to consider the future of the show, even at its very early stages of development,” said Jetpack’s Gardiner. “We have to be prepared for it to go into all the different platforms and mediums kids are accessing. We know kids are prolific with their platforms and devices. If you want your brand to succeed in the long term, you’ve got to be thinking about how it can work in different spaces.” For the Jetpack-distributed property Moley, a Roblox game was developed and released in time for the show’s launch on Boomerang in Europe. “It enables kids to experience the brand and the characters in a different way. It gets the creators to think about the show in a different way. We know that Roblox is huge; this is where kids are.”

“You used to rely on your broadcaster much more to get your property to your audience,” observed Serious Kids’ Dexter. “We’ve only recently started to employ marketing agencies when we’re launching a show for them to do a lot of the legwork in terms of parental blog sites, influencers, people who are going to draw [others] to your show. In the case of preschool, you are targeting the parents. If they’re not finding it, the kids will have more trouble finding it, too.”

Discoverability “is one of the biggest challenges,” said CAKE’s Bays. “It was the parents who were in charge of everything before. With tablets and touch devices, even the youngest kids are taking control of their media consumption and making their own choices. The temptation from a content point of view is to blast content everywhere to reach them everywhere. We’re considering which platforms will have the best potential to express the brand in the best way. How we can best use the platforms to express the different elements of our IP.”

The conversation then moved to AVOD platforms, which have emerged as key buyers of preschool fare. “We’ve experimented with some brands, just putting them on every single AVOD platform in the States,” said Dexter. “And to be frank, the results are pretty disappointing. They say you’re going to get a great share of the AVOD revenue. I think it’s great for the AVOD channels, which are getting your content for free while you labor to load your content to their particular portal. We agreed to review after a year of putting a show everywhere. And it really hasn’t worked.”

SVOD deals, Dexter continued, “where you’re being paid correctly for your content, have been very lucrative.”

Dandelooo’s Pétry-Sirvin noted that in France, the linear broadcasters remain significant pieces of the financing puzzle. “We can still build our blocks in the traditional way, with linear co-producers, the way we’ve been doing it for the past 20 years. The SVOD channels coming along are creating more opportunities that are different. It gives us more opportunities to put our shows together. It is more doors, more genres. It’s extremely creative.”

FAST channels catering to kids are a potential growth opportunity for independent producers, Gardiner added. “Speaking as a distributor, our strategy is always to work with as many platforms as we possibly can. It’s about getting the right mix and extracting the most value at the right time in the value chain. That’s why we like to work with Netflix, and at the same time, we like to work with Roku.”

“It’s not just more opportunities—it’s different kinds of opportunities,” said CAKE’s Bays. “There seems to be a lot of big players now who are defining what their own version of preschool content is. [The preschool block] Cartoonito just launched. Netflix is doing all sorts of different things. It’s helping to find new ways of doing things. I’ve been particularly excited by developing for YouTube. They want [content] uniquely developed for YouTube, speaking to that specific audience. It’s an interesting challenge to do preschool in a way that is very focused on a particular broadcaster’s style or audience.”

Regan asked the panelists if themes such as sustainability and diversity are being featured in more preschool content today. Dexter noted that she’s seeing shows presented as “this is an environmental series or this is a show about diversity. When you’re presenting it to broadcasters for commissioning, that can be a hurdle because it’s too focused. It’s got to be bigger than that. It’s got to have all of those themes in there—diversity, environmental challenges, all the things you want to convey to children. But I think it’s a mistake to be too narrow. It’s quite difficult to do 52 episodes about one subject.”

Those themes should be “naturally intertwined” into series, Dandelooo’s Pétry-Sirvin added. “It should come naturally into the episodes.”

Bays said the industry is moving away from “throwing diversity or representation or equality at shows, adding it in at the end. We’re thinking now, how is this part of the DNA of the show? How is it in there but not a thing? The stories then flow from that rather than us trying to crowbar in something. The audience spots that a mile off. The broadcasters spot it. And it’s not doing anyone any good. Diversity is rightly at the top of everyone’s agenda. We’re trying hard to build it into the show from the ground up.”

“Local cultural identities are still hugely important,” Gardiner added. “I hope we don’t all race toward a great homogenized universe where everybody looks different but looks the same. It’s important for all sorts of different reasons that nations and languages and accents are all represented. The Australians made a direct push for having more Australian identity within their content. Lo and behold, they have the fastest-growing preschool show in the world that sings to their identity and what it means to be Australian. To stand out, we’ve got to push the boundaries, we have to do things differently. At the same time, you still have to stand for something and identify with something.”

Mama K’s Team 4, from Triggerfish Animation Studios and CAKE, is a good example of that, Bays said. The show, commissioned by Netflix, “brings that authentic perspective of [creator Malenga Mulendema’s] lived experience in Africa to life, for a global audience, but keeping it very focused on the origin of where she came from as a creator and where the characters are based.”

“You need that creative heart,” Dexter added. “That carries through. It has to be there. Why was that show made? Who had that concept? Was it a game you used to play with your child? Was it dreams of being a superhero? If it has that beating heart, it shows, and it’ll give it a strong foundation to make a series. You can’t just insert these elements as a box-ticking exercise.”

The challenge, Pétry-Sirvin said, “is to keep that sparkle all the way through development and production. It can be so long to develop something!”

Pétry-Sirvin also pointed to the importance of authentic local stories that can be brought to the global marketplace. “There are so many different cultures in the world, so many interesting topics we can tackle; it opens the door to many new projects. As long as you keep it relatable to other kids in the world, there’s no reason we can’t root stuff into real cultures.”

“It’s amazing how many folkloric traditions are the same,” said Dexter. “Humanity has the same aspirations and hopes and dreams, so there will be something for everybody.”

The conversation then moved to the importance of educational components in preschool shows.

“Preschool content can have the most profound, positive impact on the audience,” Bays said. “They’re excited about getting information and learning about the world and finding stuff out. They’re naturally curious. Having educational stuff, or even the hint of it, in content for older kids often puts them off. There are exceptions to that rule. It feels like you can get so much great nourishment within younger kids’ shows, as long as you embed it well, as long as you hide the learning and make it part of the story. We’ve been trying to lay breadcrumbs in educational shows to help kids feel smart and help them get to the answers, maybe before the characters, and working with educators to find ways to scaffold their learning, giving them bits they can add to themselves. So you give them the framework in the show but then enable them to learn in their own way through the show. It’s having the characters not just teaching information and facts, [but also] modeling ways to learn.”

Pétry-Sirvin said edutainment shows “used to only be for the public broadcasters. Now, the commercial channels and platforms are asking for takeaways and things that kids can learn from and grow from. That means it’s a new era. The whole world has realized how important it is for the eyeballs to not just waste their time and be purely entertained. That means our job is meaningful, and that’s quite important.”

Thanks to the Young Audiences Content Fund (YACF) in the U.K., Dexter said, CITV, Milkshake! and S4C “have started commissioning and buying things that are strongly educational. In addition, commercial channels like Cartoonito want to see an educational document with the presentation. They want to know how your project’s core concepts relate to their [curriculum] pillars. However soft the educational content is.”

“Educational was maybe a little bit looked down upon compared to, say, comedy ten years ago,” said Gardiner. “Now there’s an appetite for education in the same way there’s been an appetite for comedy. The challenge has been getting the balance right. I think we need to do a lot more creative development on educational content.”