TV Kids Summer Festival Recap

If there was one overarching piece of advice to emerge from the TV Kids Summer Festival this month, it was that standing still—doing things the way you always used to do them—is not an option. Whether you’re a producer trying to complete the financing of a show, a distributor looking to maintain revenues from a challenged market or a trusted channel finding ways to make sense of being on YouTube, pivoting and adapting are paramount. And obviously, you have to be on YouTube, in one way or another.

Missed any of the sessions? Catch up on-demand on everything here.

We heard that refrain from all the “broadcasters” we convened at the festival. In our opening session with Louise Bucknole at Paramount UK & Ireland, she highlighted the importance of co-productions and her wish to see more producers come to her with well-thought-through digital rollout strategies. “We’re always competing for kids’ time. You’ve got to be present on the platforms they’re on. Looking at that as part of your production plan is interesting to us. It’s about discovery and engagement, and social media and YouTube are often the entry point for some kids into new brands. We have recently been releasing full episodes on YouTube. We have short-form and other assets on Milkshake! on YouTube to drive that engagement and awareness. Linear and VOD are still key—we have to drive those ratings. We’re a commercial business. But we understand that the engagement from kids happens in different ways.”

Bucknole referenced Nickelodeon’s use of YouTube to launch a brand-new IP, Kid Cowboy. I had the great pleasure of taking a deep dive into that strategy with Ashley Kaplan, executive VP of unscripted and digital franchise studio at Nickelodeon. “You can’t talk about kids without talking about YouTube,” she said. “YouTube is important, but it’s not a great place to make money. The strategy for Kid Cowboy is to build it into the next major franchise. We start on YouTube. We introduce the IP there—the world, the characters, the music. We get kids as excited as we can. Once they are, we can move beyond the YouTube content we’re making. We can do more narrative, long-form storytelling. The goal here is not just to build large YouTube channels. The goal is that this becomes the next PAW Patrol, with a long-form series, with theatricals, toys and consumer products. That is the goal. I believe the next PAW Patrol will be born on YouTube.”

Over at Disney Branded Television, meanwhile, Gino Guzzardo, VP for multiplatform content, is leading the development of a wealth of short-form content for use on YouTube as well as its own platforms. “Go back to a place and time when Mickey Mouse did not exist. Charming character, new technology, with animation. How is [Walt Disney] going to get it out there? He used shorts as a vehicle to bring Mickey to the biggest platform, movie theaters. What we do now is a lot more complex with all these different platforms and competition, and there’s a lot out there, but it’s essentially the same approach. We are using shorts to bring our characters out into the world, win over fans and bring them back.”

Public broadcasters, too, have had to implement YouTube strategies to maintain their relevance among audiences. Marie McCann, senior director of children’s content at CBC, referred to YouTube as the “third prong of our distribution strategy for video content,” alongside the CBC Kids morning block and CBC Gem. “Our digital teams recognized the power of YouTube to reach audiences,” McCann said. “We were able to work with our partners and start rolling out promotional clips and short-form videos, as well as our longer-form shows. We see it as one of the principal distribution arms of our content. That’s important as a public broadcaster. We have the ability to go where the audiences are. We’re getting content to them where they need it, when they need it.”

Traditional broadcasters are all evolving their positions on creator economy content, a space that continues to be dominated by pocket.watch with its stable of popular channels like Ryan’s World and Toys and Colors. “You’ve seen new data come out of Nielsen over the last 18 months, two years, that shows that YouTube is not only dominating mobile screens and PCs, but it is dominating the living room television,” Chris M. Williams, founder and CEO of pocket.watch, said in his keynote session. “It’s the only one that’s truly growing. It’s gone from 6 percent when they started reporting to 12 percent of all watch time in the U.S. on television. This did open up some eyes. The early adopters will see the most success. We’ve been very successful with our partners at Hulu, Peacock and Amazon, who’ve expanded their portfolio of our creator content and are investing in additional content with other creators. All the major global players certainly have or are formulating strategies around digital creators. The local players, particularly internationally, will be slower to adopt. I expect that flood to come after. It’ll start with the global players who are all clearly leaning in, and I think the local players will realize that to compete with YouTube, they will have to adopt some of these strategies and embrace creator content.”

We also took a deep dive into digital-first content with a panel moderated by industry expert Emily Horgan, featuring intelligence from two different ends of the spectrum: Elianne Friend of 9 Story Media Group and Francesco Miceli from TheSoul Publishing. 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 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 excited to produce for these platforms.”

Of course, it’s not all about digital-first content, as much as it may feel like that these days. The “traditional” ecosystem, while taking a beating amid broader industry shifts, is still finding ways to engage with audiences with premium, professional content. Our Creative Spirit session enlisted the expertise of two purveyors of high-quality kids’ fare in the U.K., Martin Pope, joint CEO of Magic Light Pictures, and Grainne McNamara, VP of development for live action and animation at BBC Studios Kids & Family, to discuss how development slates are being crafted. ZDF Studios’ Oliver Grundel, Cottonwood Media’s David Michel and ZDF’s Nicole Keeb joined the event to share their successful strategies for bringing compelling, big-budget live-action teen series to the screen. Our powerhouse session on boutique distributors delivered great advice from Dandelooo’s Emmanuèle Pétry, Serious Kids’ Genevieve Dexter, MIAM! animation’s Hanna Mouchez and Tulipop Studios’ Helga Árnadóttir.

“You have to be where the audience is,” said Netflix alum Amy Takahara in our keynote session about where the business is headed and the advice she’s giving creatives at her Sigma Girl Media consultancy. “You have to try your best to get in front of them and capture their attention. I don’t think it’s necessarily going after user-generated content. It can be, but I think it is more about creating content that will speak directly to them, their interests and what they want. It’s not about the traditional way of making content. It’s about how we adjust our thinking and perceptions of things in a way that will appeal to the audience.”

And knowing what will appeal to the audience means tapping into all the data available, from YouTube, channel partners, traditional research agencies and more. That necessity, which came up in all of our sessions, was why we turned to the team from Dubit for our closing session with CEO Ian Douthwaite and team members Laura Dudley-Gough and Benjamin Sumner. The trio revealed new research on kids’ media habits and tips for how IP owners can explore opportunities in gaming. 

“The cost of producing a game in Roblox is so much less than animation, so much less than film,” Douthwaite said. “There are plenty of ways to be on that platform, from having a full-on game around your IP—probably the most expensive—to pop-up games, which you can integrate into an already popular game. You can also create fashion items, which is a cheap way of getting onto that platform. With gaming, you are potentially hitting a new audience, so you can create awareness of the brand or IP.”