‘Our biggest competitors are kids,’ children’s TV producers tell MipJunior delegates

L-R: Adina Tartak Pitt, Ken Faier, Anna Shchur, Ailing Zubizarreta & Orion Ross
MIPJUNIOR: The growing influence of creator-led platforms like YouTube and Roblox has meant that traditional children’s TV producers and studios are essentially going head-to-head with children for attention.
“We’re living in a creator-platform world these days. Our biggest competitors are kids,” Ken Faier, CEO and president of Epic Story Media, told delegates on day two of MipJunior here in Cannes today.
The former DHX Media (now WildBrain) exec said the industry has been turned on its head by the fact that 90 million kids are playing Roblox each day and millions of others create content specifically for YouTube as well as other social platforms.
Linear television is still an important element of the ecosystem, argued Faier, though the traditional structures by which content is produced and released have changed, making it even more essential for kids brands to have a cross-platform strategy.
“Is TV dead? It’s not dead. It’s absolutely still an important part of the ecosystem. But it’s one part of it. There’s no one thing that is everything – we have to be everywhere,” he said during the session, which was moderated by Adina Tartak Pitt, former VP of content acquisitions, partnerships and coproductions for kids and family at Warner Bros Discovery.
“You can spend US$15m on a 52×11′ series that takes three years to make and four more years to make your money back. That doesn’t make any sense, but we’ve done it for years, and it makes a little less sense now. So you don’t have to do 52x11s – there are different models and different ways of launching content.”
From a monetisation perspective, however, Roblox is not the only game in town, with Faier emphasising that it is not easy to make money on the California-based social gaming platform.
He cited animated adventure property Slugterra, which Epic Story produces alongside WildBrain, as an example of a property placing content across multiple verticals but only monetising two of them.
“It’s not easy to make money [on Roblox], but when I look at the return on investment for Slugterra, it’s the mobile game and the toy line that we did monetise. Those are the two things – everything else kids want for free. So [you have to think about] where are you going to make your money back and be realistic about it.”
Fellow panelist Orion Ross, VP of international animation for The Walt Disney Company, said that the ability to get content released quickly was an advantage when looking to “prototype” new properties.
“Many of the things people are most afraid of, in terms of [audience] fragmentation and the number of platforms, are also huge opportunities because it’s never been easier to prototype your idea and get it in front of an audience,” he said. “As part of development, it’s important to get to your prototype and proof of concept in whatever way you can.”
Elsewhere, Anna Shchur, CEO and executive producer at recently launched Barcelona-based Siesta Entertainment, discussed the importance of artificial intelligence (AI) to the future of the content business. “We cannot live without AI. This is how we optimise our work and the time we spend on producing something,” she said.
“Everyone is scared about AI taking over script writing and all scripts being in some crazy AI style. But we are behind the creation and production process, so we are always on the human side of tech. We have to be working hand-in-hand [with AI].”
Ailing Zubizarreta, VP of content development and creative services at US-based Cisneros Media, added: “That’s where the magic is: the alchemy between the human force behind [storytelling] and the technology.”