MipJunior left warm sensations with good business, more players and types of animation from last year. For many years, TV channels have segmented kids audiences into different categories: socioeconomic, status, gender, race, geography location, etc. Now, children are crossing gender and the other barriers, obliging producers to adapt their shows to different targets.
Many updates on the kids’ industry were shown like the animation consolidates all across the world with more creations and new techniques coming from APAC and Ibero-America where more producers are attending the event and betting stronger on the genre, especially from India and Spain, respectively, but also Singapore and Brazil, to mention a few.
Avril Blondelot, from Eurodata, opened the session panels with “Glance” and highlighted five trends such as investigative duos/teams (‘Grosha & Mr B’, from France Télévisions), puppets (‘Teddy Telephone Show’ from Limitless/RTVE/Patito, the best-performing show in Spain for 4-6 year olds), young presenters (‘For Your Info’ from Fresh Start Media & Magnify Media is a UK news show presented only by kids) and bigger roles to teenagers ( ‘The Unlisted’, ABC Australia/Netflix); e) diversity (‘The Casagrandes’, an animation featuring a Down’s syndrome character).
On ‘View from the Top: Rewriting the rules of the Game’, Tiphaine De Raguenel, director of Children & Youth Activities, France Televisions, commented, “We have been betting on character-driven stories during the last years. Now, even we continue to do so, we are going deeper in terms of developing new storytelling and bigger stories with global appeal”.
As new streaming players emerge, the competition to reach and engage young audiences is going to get fiercer. “Streaming services taking kids seriously has been a pretty important factor in the growth of the industry”, said Josh Scherba, President, WildBrain (Canada). “The market is so fragmented and cannibalized. The pie is divided into so many little slivers, so the ability of any service to get a big audience is limited today”, added Andy Heyward, Chairman & CEO, Genius Brands International. Genevieve Dexter, Founder and CEO, Eye Present Productions, concluded: “In some properties, we’ve decided that AVOD is the resurgent form, as it allows creators to drive the brand”.
Adam Woodgate, from Dubit (UK), remarked that ‘Middle Kingdom’ or 6-10 year-old children are hard to target with content. “They’re outgrowing tablets but are only just starting to migrate to smartphones. There is no one-size-fits-all solution that product-makers can use to connect with this group at scale. More video is being consumed by children year-on-year, but linear share of their time is declining. On linear, kids still watch more feature films, animation and comedy but YouTube already owns gaming, and now its taken music from linear TV”, he concluded.
