Our #Kidtech podcast provides insight into the ever-changing kids digital landscape. SuperAwesome CEO Dylan Collins spoke with former Nickelodeon President and current MiMO Studios CEO Cyma Zarghami to discuss the kids’ content landscape and the importance of building authentic and emotional connections with young viewers. 

Offer interactive experiences in your kids campaigns 

“The biggest change at the moment is the role of interactivity, community, and the intimacy of the experience that kids are having with content,” said Zarghani. 

Brands can offer interactive experiences for kids through social media, gaming, or any number from a wide variety of options. “It’s different formats, different deliveries, and different sources… kids have an incredible appetite for all forms of content.” 

Speak directly to kids to unlock lifetime value (LTV) 

“For many of the streaming services, subscription is paramount. How do you get the subscribers to stay with you?” asked Zarghami. “A lot of people are discovering that kids are going to be a really important way to do that.”

Kids often maintain loyalty to their favorite products through adulthood, rewarding the brands who do communicate with them a higher lifetime value (LTV). So why are some major streaming services hesitant to build market share within the kids space? 

“It’s not because they don’t care about kids,” said Zarghami. “It’s because [kids content] is not their core competency or their core business. Kids are…becoming really important to everybody. People are starting to understand the value of the emotional connection that kids are going to have [with you] to maintain a relationship into the future.”

Zarghami has a word of advice for all streaming services: “The brand that decides it cares most about the kids audience stands the best chance.”

Study previous kids trends to predict their future actions 

“Things that came from the past… are going to influence the future,” Zarghami predicted. Studying the ways kids consumed old media can lead to insights on how they will adapt to newer platforms. “Consumers will gravitate to some of the familiar things that they used to love on linear that are transitioning to streaming,” she said. “[Their patterns] would be cyclical, the same as they were even back in the early ‘90s.”

Cater to the positivity that kids currently value   

Unprecedented times have changed what kids are looking for in their entertainment. “Escapism, and what I would call lean-back TV’, is actually having a moment right now, because there is so much heavy stuff happening in kids’ lives.”  

Zarghami noted that kids have placed a higher value on ethical action and togetherness. “All of the things that have bubbled up over the past year are the things that are going to inform the content that’s coming out next,” she said. “Community is really important. Kindness is really important. Curriculum is really important. Diversity is really important.”

Above all, kids are looking for positivity.  

“The need to be together and escape is way more important than it’s ever been. Those two things together are going to change the fundamentals of the content that we see.”


Listen to the full episode on Spotify, iTunes, Amazon Music, or Soundcloud.