YouTube Strategies Explored at the TV Kids Festival

HARI’s Sophie “Kido” Prigent, Wind Sun Sky Entertainment’s Jo Redfern, pocket.watch’s Brian C. Janes and C To The B Productions’ Claude Brooks highlighted the various ways IP owners can utilize YouTube at the TV Kids Festival.

The Mass Exposure panel moderated by TV Kids’ Kristin Brzoznowski can be viewed here. It featured Prigent, head of distribution at HARI; Redfern, managing director of kids at Wind Sun Sky Entertainment; Janes, VP of distribution operations and IT at pocket.watch; and Brooks, CEO of C To The B Productions.

The session began with a conversation about navigating YouTube’s evolving requirements for kids’ content.

“Back in 2020, we were at 1 million views per day,” said Prigent of HARI’s traction on the platform with Grizzy & the Lemmings. “We went from that to 2.5 million views per day in 2023. So, [YouTube’s changing requirements] didn’t have such an impact on us. Before that all happened, we had just signed a worldwide deal with Netflix, which was giving us more exposure. The first season was becoming a hit on Warner worldwide. So, all these fueled the YouTube channel subscriptions. We were not so much hit actually by this.”

For Redfern, YouTube has “moved from whatb used to be perceived as just a marketing platform to now being a platform in and of itself. You can create and launch brands on that platform. It’s not that magic money tree that perhaps it was once considered, but the platform is so entrenched now in the lives of digital native kids. Its importance to people like us who work in that brand space has only increased. It’s their default search engine. It’s the thing that they go to when they have some downtime. It’s the thing that is more or less always on [their devices] when they’re in their hands. So, it’s become ever more important in terms of a platform for brand owners.”

Janes referenced a Nielsen report showing that YouTube’s new policies “actually helped to leapfrog the streamer to number one for kids, with a 33 percent rise in viewership year-over-year for kids 2 to 11. Netflix is number two, with a falling 21 percent year-over-year viewership. That’s just incredibly impactful for the story about how YouTube is doing for us. The revenues were definitely impacted. I think it’s inspired creators to think about diversifying their portfolio.”

Wind Sun Sky sees YouTube as its “primary” platform, Redfern noted. “It’s gone from outlier to being a non-negotiable part of that flywheel. It’s part of a bigger jigsaw puzzle as brand owners and brand builders. Even the streamers have woken up to that power, too. Netflix is using YouTube in a really interesting way in terms of bringing YouTube viewers through. They’re dropping premiere episodes on YouTube. Your content needs to be where kids are hanging out. YouTube is a vital part of that. The streamers know it, broadcasters use it. What’s interesting for me, and it’s relatively nascent, is we’re seeing now the rise of YouTube on connected TVs. So, this battle for the living room; it’s not just the preserve of broadcasters and streamers anymore. It is parents and kids sitting down and going, What can we watch together?”

Janes also highlighted the co-viewing experience that can come from YouTube on the big TV, and discussed how pocket.watch has built its business on the platform and beyond. “Pocket.watch partners with creators that have already amassed a significant audience. We like to look at what they’ve already been producing, what’s been working for them, and help to extend that brand. For example, with Ryan of Ryan’s World, we developed the TV show Ryan’s Mystery Playdate, [which] ran for five seasons on Nickelodeon and got an Emmy nomination. So, we look at ways to expand beyond just YouTube, but using YouTube as that core marketing component as well. For our SVOD service, we might launch a new show there, but then put the first episode for free on the creator’s channel and then have calls to action to go check out Ryan and Friends Plus.”

Brooks is co-creator, with Snoop Dogg, of Doggyland, an animated series available on YouTube. “One of the big things for Snoop Dogg and I when we came up with this idea was to make sure that we launched it on a platform that was free for everybody. One of the things that speaks to our audience and to the kids in a big way is TikTok dancing. Almost all of our episodes have that type of engagement. We now see folks shooting our show on the big screen, and they’re doing the dance-along. YouTube really has helped launch that.”

Ecosystems feed each other, Prigent said, “whether we’re talking about linear, SVOD or YouTube. You have to have this exposure on YouTube because it means that kids anywhere at any time can find you—and parents and carers, obviously. It’s massively important.”

As for how to program a YouTube channel, Janes responded, “If you’re going to launch a YouTube channel, you have to have a plan for uploading videos on a regular basis. Doesn’t have to be daily. It could be weekly. It could be one to two times a week. Having a full season of something to launch can be nice to have, so if you put the marketing out there and people come and binge-watch, great. But if you don’t have that 16th episode or that 16th video after those first 15, your audience is not going to stick around.”

Redfern referenced the term “algorithmic health” and concurred with Janes’ point about regular refreshes and consistency. “The key to me, as someone who came from a broadcast background, is reframing how you consider content when you’re making it. It used to be that your YouTube channel was an afterthought. Now, you’ve got to think about how you’re going to service that channel and that audience with your content much earlier. That will pay dividends in terms of efficiencies, but also give you that ability to keep consistently showing up on YouTube, that upload cadence. Make sure that you’re playing to what YouTube is prioritizing. Careful planning of uploads, maintaining a cadence, making sure you feed the channel, and also, again from a kid’s point of view, knowing what they’re there for. What’s their need state when they’re on YouTube? You get to know your audience in a much more intimate way than you ever did with broadcast. So do that. Lean into them, be curious, because then you can service their need state when they’re on YouTube, and that means they’re more likely to come back.”

The panelists then talked about promoting discoverability. Brooks highlighted the use of social media. “Our show is really about social-emotional values, though we also delve into cognitive. So, our songs have a lot to do with real-life stuff that can uplift you and get you thinking about different things. When you throw it into a cool beat and choreography and everything, it just adds to this world that really does lead right into what social media is doing.”

Redfern observed, “Younger millennial parents grew up with social networks. They’re using that to talk to other parents as well. What are you watching? It’s the watercooler moment in terms of finding what’s trending on YouTube. That’s where social media comes in. It helps with that discoverability problem that we have with YouTube, but again, it helps promote that sense of community. Younger demographics don’t want to be passive when they’re engaging with brands. To Claude’s point, they want to engage with it. They want to share, they want to talk about it, they want to connect. Social media is a way that they can do that around YouTube, and it really helps drive that YouTube channel as your core platform.”

There are plenty of cross-promotion opportunities within YouTube itself, Prigent said. “If you have a linear partner, they do their promotion for their own services. You benefit from that; they benefit from your channel. If you have several channels, you can cross-promote across them.”

Janes expanded upon Prigent’s point, adding, “We actually launched an in-house agency called Clock.Work, [through which] we can work with major brands like Mattel, Nintendo and Paramount to create custom content with the creator that will then be published on their channel. We also have an ad sales team that will place media throughout YouTube and YouTube Kids to promote that content and that brand.”

HARI is currently developing the rollout strategy for season four of Grizzy & the Lemmings and determining where YouTube sits within that plan. “We look at it territory by territory because we don’t have the same flexibility in terms of rights,” Prigent said. “You may have some holdbacks, SVOD or linear. We’re thinking about starting with YouTube in batches, as we deliver. That is also to promote the launch on the local partner broadcasting the show. It’s really a great tool in that sense.”

Looking at YouTube analytics can help inform a rollout strategy, Janes noted. “We can get a pretty good sense of how something is going to perform off YouTube based on how it’s performing on YouTube.”

Redfern agreed, adding, “Once we’ve got enough content on the YouTube channel where we can gather meaningful data, we know which characters are tracking, which kind of stories, which kind of educational shorts are resonating. We’ll make more of those. We might make less of the others. It’s a really fascinating way of making content. It can feel slightly relentless and exhausting at times. But in terms of a way to create content, I can’t think of a better way to do it in terms of that test-and-learn ethos.”

For Janes, the key metric is average view duration, “which is a measure of how far into each video the audience is watching. If you have a ten-minute video and they’re making it in about 20 seconds and they’re dropping off, you know that you did something wrong somewhere. If you’ve got an audience that’s sticking with you through 70 to 80 percent of your video, you’re on to something, and you look for those patterns in your content. We pay attention to click-through rate a little bit, as well. That is more about how well we are promoting that video to the audience so that they click to it. We have massive libraries of content on YouTube already through our creators, and we look a lot at the long tail. So, the views beyond the first 45 days is something that will help you understand what’s still performing well in your catalog. The only word of caution is to be careful about chasing trends. Those are fleeting and not necessarily the best way to build that long-term relationship with the audience.”

Redfern added: “It’s very easy to get sucked into analytics on YouTube. I love tinkering with a dashboard and seeing what I can uncover that might be that secret sauce. It can take you down a rabbit hole that perhaps isn’t right. So, you need to balance that with, what does my audience want? It is that authenticity of connection.”

“You can use the content from the past at the start of compilations and things like that and capitalize on this content that is already performing super well,” Prigent added. “I think as long as you stay true to the essence of the show and that you don’t suffer from trends just for the sake of it, then you captivate your audience.”