Kids Media Club Podcast

Recorded live at MIP Junior in Cannes, Jo grabs Andrew and Jonathan from Twin Atlas — the studio behind Creatures of Sonaria, one of Roblox’s deepest and most beloved game worlds — for a conversation that doubles as a preview of their panel session on stage an hour later.

Twin Atlas are at MIP Junior because the line between gaming and entertainment is blurring in real time, and Creatures of Sonaria is the proof. Built six years ago, grown through community co-creation, now moving into merchandise, licensing, an animated series on Sky, and active conversations around film — it’s the reverse distribution model that keeps coming up across kids media, this time born entirely on Roblox. The conversation covers how community-driven lore works as a content development engine, what authentic brand collaboration on Roblox actually looks like (the Avatar: Last Airbender event that brought Appa into the game as a playable creature is the standout example), and why Roblox’s safety investments — however painful in the short term for developers and the stock price — are the right long game.

• The episode’s sharpest moment is on data. Thirteen million concurrent players for the Bruno Mars concert versus eleven million NBA Finals viewers makes for a striking headline, but the more interesting point is what Roblox data can actually tell an IP owner: not just how many people showed up, but where they stood, what they interacted with, and which unexpected character became the event’s breakout star. That kind of behavioural intelligence is simply not available from broadcast, and Twin Atlas’s argument is that smart IP owners should be treating Roblox as a real-time testing ground for everything that comes after.

Emma Witkowski, VP of Media Solutions at WildBrain, returns to the podcast for a conversation that started as a LinkedIn exchange between her and Jo about trust in kids media and grew into something worth doing properly on the podcast.

The central argument is one that feels obvious once it’s stated but is surprisingly underserved in the industry conversation: reach and trust are not the same thing. Just because a platform can put content in front of millions of kids doesn’t mean it has earned the relationship that makes that content — and the advertising around it — actually land. Emma breaks trust down into three layers: parental confidence in the environment, children’s familiarity with characters and creators, and advertiser confidence in brand-safe context. All three are needed, and none of them is guaranteed by scale alone.

• The conversation covers co-viewing as the most undervalued audience segment in advertising right now, Gen Alpha’s role as household CMO and their inbuilt spam filter for inauthentic brand behaviour, the case for branded content over programmatic placement, and why joy should be a KPI not just a creative nice-to-have. Emma’s closing line is the one worth sitting with: stop asking whether kids audiences are worth investing in and start building the right ways to invest in them — because the long-term sustainability of kids content is genuinely at risk.

A live recording from MIP Junior in Cannes, with Andy, Emily and Jo grabbing Jon Mason, founder of Jollywise and creator of Stan and Gran, for a conversation that cuts against the grain of most MIP conversations. Instead of talking about how to get a show made, Jon is asking whether the show is the right format at all — and whether the industry is measuring the wrong things entirely.

The provocation at the heart of the discussion is a LinkedIn article Jon wrote questioning whether dwell time and views are sufficient metrics for kids content, at a moment when a World Economic Forum white paper on AI and children is asking the same question from a policy direction. Jon’s argument is that the industry has allowed data that is easy to collect — clicks, completion rates, engagement — to become the only data that matters, when what actually counts is what a child does after the content ends. Whether they go outside, ask a question, make something, explore. That’s much harder to measure, but arguably much more important. Bluey, he notes, are starting to think about exactly this.

• The conversation ranges across screen-free AI products (Mallow, Freckle, Yoto), the gap between the ed-tech world and the kids IP world that MIP could usefully bridge, the risk of AI companions that are permanently available and relentlessly sycophantic, and Jon’s core creative mission with Stan and Gran: getting kids outside. His closing challenge to the room is a good one — does your IP have to be a TV show? And if the answer is yes, are you absolutely sure?

This pre-MIP Junior sponsored episode brings Nicolas Eglau, Managing Director of EMEA, APAC and Global Distribution at Moonbug Entertainment, into conversation with Andy, Emily, and Jo. The timing is deliberate — Moonbug has a lot to talk about heading into Cannes.

Nicolas traces the logic of what he calls Moonbug's reverse distribution model: where traditional studios start with premium pay TV and work their way down to YouTube, Moonbug started on YouTube and has worked its way up — through premium streamers, linear channels in 100-plus markets, consumer products, gaming, live events, and now, with the Cocomelon movie landing in February, theatrical. Owning all of their IP outright is what makes the model work; it means no permissions to seek, no rights to negotiate, and the ability to move from idea to execution in months rather than years. The linear channel launch in the Philippines took five months from concept to air. Emmy's Wonder Wardrobe — a live action Little Angel spin-off built around a character the audience was already asking for — went from data insight to Disney and Netflix in similarly short order.

• The newest announcement is Big Feelings, a music company Moonbug has built to open up its distribution and monetisation infrastructure to third-party artists and creators — with Snoop Dogg and Doggyland among the first partners. It's a bet that what Moonbug has built for its own music-led IP can be valuable to others who have the talent but not the network. The episode closes on the Cocomelon movie, which Nicolas describes as the climax of everything the model has been building toward — and on which he is, emphatically, not scared.

A bonus mini episode from Jo, recorded at the Young Horizons Film Festival in Warsaw — a relatively small but well-curated industry event that she reports punching above its weight. Two conversations captured at cocktail hour, both worth hearing.

First, David Kleeman on why "a good story well told" is no longer enough as a creative ambition. His argument is that kids engage with stories through three fundamental need states — wanting to be involved, wanting to explore freely, and wanting to be part of a community — and that the industry keeps accidentally frustrating all three through IP protectionism, algorithmic curation, and age-gating from social spaces. His closing point is sharp: start with a core, let the audience tell you where they want to go next, and don't try to build everywhere at once.

Then Janine Weigold former Netflix executive now consulting across the industry, on the funding gap that nobody has solved: the space between an early idea and a full commission, where animation in particular keeps falling through the cracks. Her argument is that broadcasters, ad sales teams, and private companies with audience reach could function as incubators — offering channels, expertise, and promotional muscle to help creators find proof of concept before the big platforms come looking. The conversation ends on data sharing, where Janine is unambiguous: platforms hoarding engagement data isn't just bad for the industry, it's preventing the discovery of the next SpongeBob.

Jo is absent again, so Andy and Emily have a two-topic episode: first, the announcement of the Business of Children's Media Summit, taking place November 12th in Dublin; then a deep dive into Jeffrey Katzenberg's viral essay on AI and the future of animation.

Dennis Crushall from Precisify joins briefly to help launch the summit, which Emily has been quietly building for months in partnership with Cultural and Creative Industries Skillnet. Taking place at the Alex Hotel in Dublin, the day-long event is focused on going direct to audience — YouTube, gaming, consumer products, and franchise strategy — and features keynote speaker Erica Quinn, Director of Kids and Family Consumer Insights at Disney, alongside BBC Children's and Education's Anna Taganov. Tickets are €75 via Eventbrite, and there will be a live podcast recording on the day. Emily has also promised a pint of Guinness to every international attendee, a commitment Andy intends to make very expensive.

The second half is a sharp dissection of Katzenberg's 2,000-word Twitter essay positioning AI as the next Toy Story moment for Hollywood — expansive rather than destructive, with tech providing the tools and Hollywood providing the soul. Andy's most interesting observation is around the John Philip Sousa parallel Katzenberg draws: the real fight may not be about the technology at all, but about copyright compensation — and studios sitting on vast IP libraries, including the newly merged Paramount-Warner entity, could stand to benefit significantly if the law catches up. The episode closes on a fittingly ironic note: someone ran the essay through an AI checker and it came back 60% AI-generated.

🎟️ Get your tickets for the Business of Children's Media Summit: https://www.eventbrite.ie/e/the-business-of-childrens-media-summit-tickets-1998215489319

📊 Explore Precisify's research and reports: https://www.precisify.com/reports-and-playbooks

Jo is thwarted by internet gremlins this week, so Andy and Emily press on without her. The Paramount-Warner merger has just cleared another significant regulatory hurdle — the California Attorney General's objections melted away after some well-timed brinkmanship — and Emily makes the case that from a kids media perspective specifically, a third major studio entity with the combined IP weight of Warner and Paramount is a genuinely good thing for the landscape. The question of whether the merged studio pulls its content from Netflix the way Disney did is examined, and Emily's read is that it won't be as extreme — but there are strategic decisions to be made around SpongeBob and other core franchises that will be worth watching closely.

The second half of the episode is a sharp conversation about digital-first animation and what it actually takes to make the model work. Sheriff Labrador's Baby Bus app background, Danny Go's live show operation, Ms. Rachel's multi-revenue approach — Emily's argument is that the YouTube-to-streaming pipeline is real but narrowing, and that the creators coming through now need to be running multi-line businesses from the start rather than betting the farm on YouTube revenue alone. It's a more structurally difficult proposition than the bubble moment that produced the current wave of creator IP, and the volume of new entrants who can pull it off is likely to be smaller going forward.

t's Netflix report week, and Emily is in the Mastermind chair as Andy and Jo work through the findings of the latest Netflix Kids Content Performance Report. The big headline: Cocomelon has dropped out of the top 10 for the first time — a landmark moment for a show that, during the pandemic, was delivering engagement numbers the platform has never seen since.

The animated series rankings have stabilised into a consistent top three for the first time — Paw Patrol, Gabby's Dollhouse, and Peppa — with Teen Titans Go and SpongeBob making notable moves once US windows opened. Ms. Rachel's arrival in the top 10 is flagged as the biggest series development of the past year, and The Creature Cases gets its regular Emily mention as the quietly grinding Netflix original that still isn't getting the industry attention it deserves. The report also covers live action series for the first time, where Nickelodeon is doing particularly well, and there's a substantive conversation about the YouTube creator pipeline and what exclusivity actually means for kids content on Netflix. Netflix Playground, gaming, and the platform's decision to remain ad-free on kids content even for subscribers on the ad tier round out the episode.

A short emergency bonus episode with Emily, Andy, and Jo, recorded in real time as news breaks during Netflix report week. The Skydance Animation partnership with Netflix is coming to an end — and Emily has thoughts.

She walks through the arc of the deal, from its origins with Apple through the flip to Netflix, and makes the case that the timing makes sense: the Paramount-Warner merger consolidating means Skydance Animation has a natural new home in that pipeline. There's one more Skydance Netflix movie still to come — a Jack and the Beanstalk project — before the partnership winds down, and a fairy-tale themed musical called Steps lands around Thanksgiving this year. The bigger question Emily leaves hanging is what Netflix now does with its animated movie pipeline, given it's been publicly chasing Disney-level animation ambition for years and just lost a key supplier.

The silver lining she spots: independent animated movies grinding through theatrical release — Chicken Hare gets a namecheck — may suddenly find their streaming window conversations getting a lot more interesting.

The full trio are back in the room for the first time since the summer, and the episode opens with Emily's debrief from the Australian Children's Content Summit in Coffs Harbour — the warmth of the welcome, the flash mob at karaoke, and the more substantive observation that Australia has quietly built one of the richest kids YouTube creator ecosystems anywhere in the world. Bounce Patrol, Ms. Moni, Mikmax, Milo and Chip — the names keep coming, and Emily's point is that Screen Australia's own content hours reports aren't counting any of it.

The sharpest line from the Australia trip comes via Tina Harris of Lah-Lah Productions, whose framing of the divide between "creatives" and "creators" as a language problem rather than a values problem landed well on Emily's panel — and the consensus is that the ACCS is ahead of most conferences in actually putting both sides in the same room and letting them learn from each other.

The second half of the episode turns to the social media ban debate, which the trio are increasingly sceptical of — not because the concerns aren't real, but because banning access is being treated as a solution to what is fundamentally an algorithm problem. Jo's point that kids who get their understanding of the world from social media, and then discuss it around the dinner table, might actually be doing something more valuable than watching the 10 o'clock news is the episode's most provocative and worth sitting with. The closer is a reminder — via the WildBrain conversation — that kids are among the most commercially valuable audiences that exist, and that the industry has been too apologetic about making that case.

Emily has travelled to Coffs Harbour for the Australian Children's Content Summit, and this episode is her dispatches from the ground — a series of short, sharp conversations captured across the event with some of the key figures shaping Australian kids content right now.

First up is Jenny Buckland, CEO of the Australian Children's Television Foundation, who gives the clearest account of what happened to the Australian kids content industry when commercial broadcaster quotas were dropped in 2020 — and why the timing, colliding with the global streaming disruption, hit harder here than almost anywhere else. Then Suzanne Ryan, founder of both the ACCS itself and SLR Productions, on why she started the summit out of post-Covid isolation and producer fellowship — and why it landed at 260 attendees when she was hoping for 60. The episode also features a conversation with Barbara Stephens from Flying Bark Productions, whose studio is navigating the shift from traditional commissioning to digital-first IP development — including the freshly launched Doom Sweeper music video, which crossed 3 million YouTube views in its first weeks — and the argument that proof of concept is now proof of audience. As well as a discussion with Tina Harris, Co-Founder of Lah-Lah Productions.

The thread running through all of it is the same one dominating kids media conversations everywhere: the traditional funding model is gone, the YouTube creator economy is thriving alongside it, and the most interesting opportunity right now is in the conversation between those two worlds.

Emily is still in Australia, so Andy and Jo continue their deep dive into the toy industry with two guests from Bonkers Toys — Lisa Wright, Head of Licensing, and Julie Splendoria, VP of Marketing. It's a conversation that traces the arc from Slither.io and JoJo Siwa's bow to the present day, and makes a compelling case that Bonkers saw the YouTube-to-toy-aisle pipeline coming before almost anyone else in the industry.

The origin story is a good one: Bonkers' CEO spotted the opportunity literally from the driver's seat on the school run, watching his kids obsess over Slither.io on their phones, and moved fast enough to be the first licensee on Ryan's World when YouTube creator toys were still being dismissed by retailers as a niche fluke. Lisa and Julie walk through how the team reads fandom — the science of views and subscriber growth, and the harder-to-quantify art of emotional hook and community intensity — and how that methodology has evolved as the landscape shifted from YouTube to TikTok to Roblox. The "playable props" strategy developed for Toys and Colors — seeding supersized versions of toys into content nine months before retail launch — is a standout example of how to build familiarity authentically rather than just blasting product placement.

The episode closes with a Q4 outlook: unboxing and blind box collectibles, the ongoing Squishies evolution, sports trading cards, and the PopMart-influenced kidult trend are all flagged as the ones to watch heading into the holiday period. Whatnot gets a mention as a platform to take seriously. And Jo reveals she's been holding a Pokémon card the whole time.

Emily is somewhere over the Middle East en route to Australia, so Andy and Jo have been let loose on the podcast control desk — new buttons and all. The result is a slightly more multimedia episode than usual, with trailers played in and reacted to in real time, and a genuinely good conversation about what the summer's animation slate says about where the industry is heading.

Four things get the treatment. Paw Patrol: The Dino Movie has just posted the franchise's strongest opening weekend ever — $20 million domestically, $69 million worldwide — and Andy and Jo make the case that the trailer reveals a show that has genuinely grown into itself, with sharper animation, better timing, and writers who clearly love the world. The Bluey movie teaser gets an equally warm reception, with Andy's observation that it chooses a falling balloon as its centrepiece moment — the smallest thing enlarged into the biggest thing — landing as the episode's neatest critical point.

Coco 2 prompts the more sceptical conversation: both Andy and Jo loved the original precisely because it felt complete, and the worry is that a sequel risks casting a shadow over something people remember with real tenderness. The Pixar slate discussion that follows — one original, Coco 2, an Incredibles spinoff — raises the question of whether the studio is in a defensive crouch. Oswald the Lucky Rabbit rounds things off: Disney reviving a century-old pre-Mickey character in a hybrid live action and hand-drawn animation style, which Andy and Jo read as both a smart copyright play and a meaningful reconnection with Disney's hand-drawn heritage.

John Baulch, publisher of Toy World magazine and the author of the Friday blog that has survived every newsletter cull Jo has ever attempted, joins Andy, Emily, and Jo for a wide-ranging conversation about the state of the toy industry in 2026 — which, it turns out, is in remarkably good shape.

John makes the case that the toy market is in a genuine purple patch: not driven by one breakout product creating supply chain chaos, but by four or five things working well simultaneously — Squishies, Pokémon, Lego, Toy Story merchandise, and the growing kidult phenomenon of adults buying collectibles for themselves. The conversation moves from evergreen IP and what Hasbro has done to revive Peppa Pig, to the fast-fashion end of the toy market: limited drops, chase figures, scarcity mechanics, and the PopMart model that the rest of the industry is now rapidly absorbing.

John's fast-fashion analogy is the sharpest frame in the episode — the idea that the toy industry is entering a phase where some product exists to thrill in the moment and disappear, just like a Primark seasonal range, and that this isn't a problem to be solved but a structural shift to be understood and managed. For anyone working in kids IP, licensing, or content who wants to understand how toys actually work in 2026, this is a very useful 40 minutes.

Jo and Emily are both away, so we’re revisiting two recent conversations that sit neatly together: one about the challenge of making original animated IP outside the Hollywood system, and one about the new frontier of creator-led cinema distribution.

First up is Matthieu Zeller, president and CEO of Belgium's nWave Studios and the team behind the Chicken Hare franchise — a case study in how a European studio can build original animated IP on a fraction of a US studio budget, through loyal distribution partners and a fully integrated model that keeps creative and commercial control under one roof. Then Caspar Nadaud of Piece of Magic Entertainment on what the Amazing Digital Circus and Iron Lung have revealed about cinema's new relationship with creator fandoms — and why the old gatekeeper model has given way to something far more collaborative and equal.

Both conversations are worth hearing in full — links to the original episodes are in the show notes.

Chickenhare

https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/kids-media-club-podcast/id1573404550?i=1000777023112

Creator Cinema

https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/kids-media-club-podcast/id1573404550?i=1000775115916

Andy and Jo are joined by Jason Tammemagi, Chief Creative Officer of Cartoon Saloon — the Oscar-nominated Irish studio behind The Secret of Kells, Song of the Sea, and Wolfwalkers — for a conversation that is as much about the philosophy of making things as it is about the business of animation.

Jason traces a career that moved from animator to director to studio founder before landing at Cartoon Saloon, where his brief is essentially to support the creative vision of founders Tom Moore, Paul Young, and Nora Twomey while keeping one eye on strategy and market. The core of the conversation is about what it actually takes to protect brave storytelling inside a risk-averse industry — and Jason is clear that the danger doesn't only come from outside the studio. Fear, he argues, is the story killer, and it operates as much in internal notes as it does in broadcaster development meetings. The instinct to sand off anything uncomfortable or gray-area is precisely what makes safe stories unsafe.

There's also a genuinely interesting thread on Cartoon Saloon's identity as a Kilkenny studio — why its Irish cultural specificity turned out to be a strength rather than a limitation, how the Secret of Kells was an act of creative bravery at a time when the entire industry was pivoting hard to CGI, and why Kilkenny being small enough that everyone walks to work turns out to matter more than it might seem. Jason's closing observation — that the industry has always been good at learning the wrong lessons — is one worth sitting with.

We're revisiting one of our favourite conversations — Emily cornered Sydney Bright at Kids Screen after she got mobbed following her panel — dropped a card in the middle of the crowd, said "come on the podcast," and here we are. Sydney is Head of Global Animation at Webtoon, the world's leading digital comics platform with 145 million monthly active users, and her job is to identify titles from the platform ripe for adaptation and take them through to screen.

It's a genuinely different development model — one where audience investment is baked in before a single frame of animation is made. Sydney explains how Webtoon tracks not just read counts but comment engagement, retention, and emotional intensity of fan response as signals for adaptation potential. The conversation gets into what it actually takes to translate a webcomic into animation, how to honour a fanbase that feels genuine ownership of a property, and why that kind of proven, community-built IP is increasingly what streamers want to see walk through the door.

There's a lot of ground covered — Wattpad's role within the same parent company, the upcoming Lore Olympus series with Amazon Prime, the titles on Sydney's radar for the 6 to 16 demographic, and what her animation students at Loyola Marymount are watching right now, which turns out to be a surprisingly useful window into where the industry is heading next.

Emily has been banging on about Chickenhare and the Hamster of Darkness for years, so she's delighted to have a professional reason to do it again. Matthieu Zeller, president and CEO of Belgium's nWave Studios, joins Andy, Jo, and Emily to talk about the Chickenhare franchise, whose second instalment — Chickenhare and the Secret of the Groundhog — is hitting cinemas now.

nWave is a 31-year-old studio with origins in stereoscopic 3D for IMAX and theme parks, and a track record of original animated features built on character-first storytelling, European financing, and budgets that are a fraction of what US studios spend. Matthieu is refreshingly direct about what that means: no massive battles or thousands-of-character set pieces, but a clarity of emotional storytelling that he argues can out-move the big studios when the script is right. The conversation gets into how nWave structures its financing through loyal European distribution partners, why constraints produce better creative work rather than worse, and why the mid-budget family animation that once anchored theatrical and DVD has been almost entirely forgotten by an industry fixated on franchises and streaming.

There's also a pointed argument running through the episode about who is actually underestimated in the room — and it's kids. Matthieu's view, backed up by test screenings, is that children handle sophisticated, layered storytelling far better than most adults in the industry give them credit for, and that the industry's tendency to dumb things down is both an insult and a missed opportunity. If you've ever wondered whether a good original family film can still get made outside the studio system, this episode is the answer.

A bonus episode timed ahead of Netflix's earnings call, with Andy and Jo putting questions to Emily as she and her team prep the next Netflix Kids Content Performance Report. The conversation starts with the Warner deal Netflix walked away from, and what that decision — clinical, unmathematical, uncharacteristically restrained — reveals about where Netflix thinks its gaps actually are.

From there it's into the data: second seasons not landing as hard, the hit-making machine feeling slightly less reliable, and the structural tension between binge-model engagement and the habit-forming retention Netflix is now chasing. Kids content, Emily argues, is central to solving that problem — it's the most habitually consumed content on any platform — which makes Netflix's growing investment in the space (YouTube creator acquisitions, the Playground gaming app, no ads on kids profiles even on the ad tier) start to look less opportunistic and more strategic.

The harder question the episode lands on is whether Netflix is actually in the business of building IP, or just exceptionally good at acquiring other people's. K-Pop Demon Hunters was lightning in a bottle — brilliant, defining, not a strategy. Emily's view is that Netflix's note is aggregation, not origination, and the Warner pursuit was less about content ambition and more about filling a catalogue gap they can't otherwise close.

Takeaways:

• In this episode, we discussed the implications of Netflix's recent data drop on children's content and engagement metrics.
• We examined how Netflix's shift from subscriber growth to engagement metrics reflects a significant corporate strategy adjustment.
• The discussion highlighted the challenges Netflix faces with second seasons not performing as strongly as expected, raising concerns about content sustainability.
• We noted the increasing competition among children's programming, particularly how established properties like Ms. Rachel are reshaping engagement on the platform.
• The podcast emphasized Netflix's strategic positioning as a safe alternative to YouTube for children's content, focusing on curated and ad-free viewing experiences.
• We explored the significance of Netflix's kids app and gaming offerings in enhancing viewer retention and engagement for younger audiences.

Links referenced in this episode:

• https://kidsmediaclub.substack.com
• https://youtube.com

Three guests on one episode — Oliver and Alvaro, co-founders of Telos Media and the team behind Solar Balls (half a billion views on the English channel alone, 2 billion across all languages), and Mary James, the Hollywood-experienced executive producer who bridges their digital-first world and the mainstream. Together they've just launched Run Monster Run, a new animated IP that hit 20 million views within two weeks of its pilot dropping on YouTube — and they're already fielding inbound interest from platforms.

The conversation covers the full playbook: how Solar Balls went from zero to 100,000 subscribers in 10 days and turned profitable within a month; why YouTube was chosen as the launch platform for Run Monster Run over a traditional pitch route; how Discord functions as a fandom hub that sits outside the algorithm; and how Alvaro manages fan engagement with a deliberately mysterious, Easter-egg-heavy approach that keeps communities theorising and proactive without burning through the IP's future potential. The team is refreshingly candid about what they're looking for in a platform partner — and equally clear that they don't need one to proceed.

The episode also gets into what makes Run Monster Run different from the current wave of independent animation: a deliberately broad, multigenerational emotional premise, complex lore built for long-term storytelling, and the creative discipline not to show everything at once. A team of 122 people, a theme song co-written by the creators of the Paw Patrol theme, and a shorts strategy designed to deepen character rather than just fill a feed. This one is worth watching closely.