Kids Media Club Podcast Podcast Por Jo Redfern Andrew Williams & Emily Horgan arte de portada

Kids Media Club Podcast

Kids Media Club Podcast

De: Jo Redfern Andrew Williams & Emily Horgan
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Kids Media Club Podcast is a podcast hosted by Jo Redfern, Andy Williams, and Emily Horgan. In each episode they chat with a different guest about the world of Kids Media. The podcast covers everything from trends in animation to the rise of Edtech.Copyright 2022 Kids Media Club Podcast Economía Marketing Marketing y Ventas Política y Gobierno
Episodios
  • Inside Animation Dingle: Storytelling, the Original IP Crisis, and Student Animation from the Festival Floor

    Inside Animation Dingle: Storytelling, the Original IP Crisis, and Student Animation from the Festival Floor
    Mar 27 2026
    This bonus episode takes a different format, with Emily reporting live from the Animation Dingle Festival in County Kerry, Ireland. Rather than a single guest, the episode brings together three separate conversations captured across the festival weekend: an interview with co-founder and festival director Maurice Galway, a chat with veteran screenwriter and director Karey Kirkpatrick, and a conversation with Ailbhe Fearon and Mulreann, the two recent graduates who swept the festival's Animation Awards with their short film Anam.Maurice sets the scene by explaining what makes Animation Dingle distinct from the industry's typical market-driven events. Now approaching its 15th year, the festival deliberately caps attendance at 750 and keeps its split exactly 50/50 between students and professionals — a structural choice that keeps the focus squarely on education and mentorship rather than deal-making. Maurice talks through several initiatives designed to lower the intimidation barrier for students, including the "Pitch and a Pint" session where students pitch directly to executives from broadcasters and streamers, a new confessional-style format for sharing ideas too wild or half-formed for a public pitch, and a "Tell Your Untold Story" stage coaching session. A theme Maurice returns to is the two-way nature of the inspiration: professionals arrive to give, and consistently leave having received something themselves from the energy and enthusiasm in the room.Karey Kirkpatrick brings a sharp perspective on the state of the industry, drawing on a long career that includes work with Aardman and multiple original features. The central argument she makes is that the entertainment industry has become so risk-averse — particularly as studios answer to shareholders rather than creative leads — that the idea of a "sure thing" has taken over, even though it doesn't really exist. She uses K Pop Demon Hunters as a case study in how a genuinely original, unconventional idea can catch fire when it's given the right platform and timing, but notes that the same idea would likely have been passed over repeatedly in a pitch room. The conversation turns to what this means for emerging creators, and Karey's advice is clear and practical: don't wait to be discovered through a pitch, make things. Streamers in particular, she argues, are increasingly behaving like distribution platforms rather than development partners — meaning the work needs to demonstrate proof of concept before it reaches them, not after. Her summary advice to students is to build the craft fundamentals so that when a door opens, they can handle the pressure that comes with it.The episode closes with Ailbhe Fearon and Mulreann Mulvihill, whose Irish-language short Anam — meaning "soul" — won seven awards at the festival, including the overall Student Animation Award. The film, about an old man and a young boy on the Aran Island of Inis Oírr, grew out of a two-week research residency on the island and draws on the philosophy of John O'Donohue and the concept of the inner child. Their commitment to making the film in Irish — not translating an English script but constructing it in the language from the ground up, down to getting the specific Inis Oírr dialect right — gives the conversation a quietly profound dimension. They also share the story of reaching out to musician Brian McGlynn (of New Vagabond) after listening to his album on repeat throughout their residency, and his score going on to win its own award at the festival. Both are newly graduated and keen to stay in the Irish animation space.Key Takeaways:Animation Dingle is deliberately not a market — the 50/50 student-to-professional split and the cap of 750 attendees are design choices that protect the festival's educational culture and make it distinct from every other industry gathering.Lowering the stakes unlocks participation — the confessional-style pitch format and the "Tell Your Untold Story" session are thoughtful responses to listening to what students actually need, recognising that not everyone thrives in a high-pressure public pitch environment.Inspiration runs both ways — professionals who come to give frequently report leaving re-energised by students' creativity and enthusiasm, something Maurice says has become one of the festival's unexpected gifts.There is no such thing as a sure thing in entertainment — Karey Kirkpatrick's core argument is that the attempt to science-ify creative risk is both futile and damaging, and that some of the industry's biggest successes (K Pop Demon Hunters, Anora) would have struggled to get made under current risk frameworks.Fear is driving creative conservatism at the executive level — the pressure of reporting to shareholders rather than creative stakeholders means executives default to "defensible" choices over bold ones, which is hurting original IP across the board.Streamers are becoming distributors, not developers — ...
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    38 m
  • Safe Social Media for Kids: How Zigazoo Is Building the Alternative to TikTok for Gen Alpha — with Ashley Maddy

    Safe Social Media for Kids: How Zigazoo Is Building the Alternative to TikTok for Gen Alpha — with Ashley Maddy
    Mar 26 2026
    In this episode, Andy, Jo, and Emily are joined by Ashley Maddy, President of Zigazoo — a social media platform built specifically for kids that has been quietly growing its user base to over 10 million while the wider debate around children and social media has grown louder and louder. The timing feels right: with social media bans for under-16s being debated in legislatures around the world, Zigazoo makes the case that the answer isn't to shut kids out of online social spaces altogether, but to build better ones.Ashley walks through what Zigazoo actually is and how it works. At its core, the platform is challenge-based — kids respond to video prompts by creating their own short-form content, and everything goes through moderation before it reaches the feed. The design philosophy is the inverse of most COPPA-compliant platforms, which tend to solve the safety problem by removing engagement entirely. Zigazoo keeps kids active and social, it just does so within guardrails built by educators rather than pure tech entrepreneurs. The founding team — husband and wife Zach and Leah — bring that dual lens of engineering and digital wellness to every product decision, and Ashley is clear that the mission is read aloud at every team meeting to keep it front and centre.The moderation conversation is illuminating. Zigazoo started with round-the-clock human moderation but has since developed a hybrid "human in the loop" model where AI handles the initial filtering — including detecting whether a user is a child or adult and flagging inappropriate content — while humans remain part of the process. The addition of a comments feature, which was held back for years due to concerns about intent being lost in written text, was only made possible once AI became reliable enough to support it.There's a lot of ground covered on what the platform has learned about kids' behaviour online. Notably, Zigazoo found that punishing bad content didn't work as well as rewarding good content — a shift from early notification-heavy approaches to a model that simply surfaces positive posts and lets the algorithm do the teaching. Kids who post well get featured; kids who don't get silence rather than a telling-off, and they adjust accordingly. The existing community of over 1,000 kid creators reinforces those norms organically, policing the platform's culture with a pride of ownership that Ashley describes as one of its most unexpected and valuable outcomes.The platform's audience data is interesting in its own right. While Zigazoo launched as a preschool app, its core audience has aged with it — 9 to 12 year olds are now its most active creators, and some users who joined five years ago are still on the platform at 15. Rather than losing them to mainstream social media, Zigazoo has had to keep evolving to stay relevant, a challenge Ashley acknowledges openly and with some enthusiasm.The brand and commercial side of the platform gets a thorough airing too. Over 100 brands — from Paramount and Amazon to toy companies, sports organisations, and publishers — use Zigazoo as a COPPA-compliant way to build genuine two-way community with kids. The platform vets all brand partners for mission alignment and manages their channels directly, which keeps the quality high but also means brands get something genuinely rare: verified, bot-free engagement with actual children. A wishlist feature that sends personalised emails to parents when a child saves a product is highlighted as a standout commercial innovation — formalising the influence kids have over family purchasing decisions in a way no other platform can currently match.The episode closes on a broader cultural note. Ashley sees the current generation of kids as meaningfully different from their parents — more media literate, more aware of the downsides of social media, and more interested in positive online experiences. Jo echoes this from her own experience as a parent, noting a generational swing away from the open, unguarded approach their own generation took to early social media. The group agrees that banning kids from social media entirely risks pushing them towards unmoderated spaces via VPNs and hand-me-down phones, and that platforms like Zigazoo represent the more responsible path.Key Takeaways:Zigazoo makes the case for building better social media rather than banning it — the platform argues that keeping kids off social altogether drives them to less safe alternatives, and that the right response is purposefully designed, moderated spaces.The challenge-based model is central to how it works — kids respond to video prompts with their own content, creating active participation rather than passive scrolling, while everything is moderated before reaching the feed.Rewarding good behaviour outperforms punishing bad behaviour — early attempts to notify kids when content failed moderation created a negative experience. Surfacing good posts and letting poor ...
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    40 m
  • Netflix Kids Content: Paw Patrol, SpongeBob, Cocomelon and What the 2025 Streaming Data Really Tells Us — with Emily

    Netflix Kids Content: Paw Patrol, SpongeBob, Cocomelon and What the 2025 Streaming Data Really Tells Us — with Emily
    Mar 20 2026
    This bonus episode of the Kids Media Club sees Andy and Jo joined by Emily, who has just published her latest Netflix Kids Content Performance Report — a deep dive into Netflix's engagement data covering the second half of 2025. It's a data-rich conversation that covers which shows are winning, which are declining, and what it all means for the wider kids content landscape.The headline finding is that Paw Patrol has taken the number one spot by hours viewed in H2 2025, driven by its first-ever US Netflix window opening in July. It's a significant moment that underscores just how competitive the preschool segment has become — Gabby's Dollhouse held the top spot in H1, Ms. Rachel has climbed from sixth to fourth place, and Cocomelon, while still enormous, is showing signs of decline. The preschool race, as Emily puts it, is very much a ten or fifteen horse race.Sesame Street's arrival on Netflix gets a thoughtful treatment. Launching with just four episodes, it performed modestly — and the group unpick why. Is it a volume problem? A brand perception issue, with audiences still associating the show firmly with PBS and YouTube rather than Netflix? Or simply that Sesame Street hasn't yet established a home on the platform? Emily is generous in her read of it, noting the brand's smart collaboration with YouTube creator Mark Rober as a savvy move to stay relevant — and Rober's own Netflix show, Crunch Lab, posted strong launch numbers.That leads into a broader conversation about Netflix's creator economy strategy. The platform has been quietly building a pipeline of YouTube-native talent — Cocomelon, Little Angel, Blippi, Ms. Rachel, and now Mark Rober — and the data suggests the crossover approach is paying off in engagement terms. Jo raises the interesting point that Netflix appeared to step back from kids originals after disbanding its dedicated team, only to start commissioning original and exclusive content with creator talent again. The consensus is that Netflix never fully stepped away — it just got more selective, leaning into broader "family" content alongside its core kids slate.SpongeBob emerges as one of the episode's most interesting talking points. Generating 143 million hours viewed on Netflix without a US window, Emily argues the Sponge is quietly having a moment that the industry isn't talking about loudly enough. She floats the prediction that SpongeBob could overtake Bluey as the top kids show in US streaming in 2026 — and notes what the strength of both SpongeBob and the Warner animation catalog (Teen Titans Go, The Amazing World of Gumball) could mean in the context of the Paramount-Warner merger.The deeper theme running through the episode is the extraordinary durability of long-running IP. Paw Patrol at 15 years old, SpongeBob at 25, Peppa at 20 — these shows have entered a multigenerational pass-down mode where they remain fresh enough for new young audiences while carrying nostalgia value for older ones. For anyone trying to break through with a new show, that's the competitive reality they're up against.The episode closes with a look at Gabby's Dollhouse's prospects for long-term franchise status, and a frank assessment of Cocomelon's decline — which Emily argues is structural rather than a failure of execution, given how narrowly age-targeted the IP is by design.Key Takeaways:Paw Patrol is Netflix's most-viewed kids show in H2 2025, powered by its US streaming debut — a clear illustration of how much a new territory window can move the needle on an established IP.Preschool is the most competitive segment on Netflix, with Gabby's Dollhouse, Ms. Rachel, Paw Patrol, and Cocomelon all jostling for position. No single show dominates the full year.Sesame Street's modest debut was likely a volume and perception problem — four episodes is thin for a brand of its stature, and audiences may not yet associate it with Netflix given its long history on PBS and YouTube.Netflix's creator-to-streaming pipeline is working — shows like Ms. Rachel and Mark Rober's Crunch Lab demonstrate that YouTube-native talent can drive strong streaming engagement, and Netflix appears to be doubling down on that strategy with original commissions.SpongeBob is underrated in the industry conversation — top animated comedy globally on Netflix without US distribution, and a genuine contender to be the number one kids streaming show in the US in 2026.Long-running, multigenerational IP is the hardest thing to compete with — shows like SpongeBob, Peppa, and Paw Patrol are being passed down from parents who grew up with them, giving them a structural advantage that newer shows simply don't have yet.Cocomelon's decline is structural, not a crisis — its very young target demographic limits its ability to build the multigenerational audience that sustains IP over the long term. Still huge; just not built to grow the way story-driven shows can.Gabby's Dollhouse has genuine franchise longevity ...
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    30 m
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