Most general streaming viewers don’t know the name Candle Media. Nor the name of its children’s media production subsidiary, Moonbug Entertainment. But parents of small children likely know programs like CoComelon and Blippi and recall with dread the endless song loops about brushing one’s teeth, taking a bath, etc.
While being unknown to their audience may be fine for the parent, Candle Media and Moonbug would like to be better known to advertisers.
To that end, on Friday, the company announced the launch of Moonbug Partner Solutions (MPS), a services package that includes media buying, creative production, YouTube account operation, program sponsorship, programmatic audience extensions and analytics.
None of the services are entirely new, Kirsten McAuliffe, Moonbug’s head of sales and partnerships in North America, who oversees MPS, told AdExchanger. But Moonbug hadn’t previously formalized those services in a real offering.
The key for MPS is that it’s built around reaching parents, McAuliffe said, and sometimes making consumer extrapolations based on the media their kids are watching. CoComelon has for years been one of, if not the, top channel week in, week out on YouTube, she said. And Blippi, an educational program, is still a monster YouTube franchise, not to mention producing or licensing major hit shows for Netflix and Amazon+.
The company’s super high ratings are tougher to monetize, though. Because those eyeballs so often belong to little babies.
And brands “rarely try to directly reach or influence parents,” McAuliffe said.
Parental controls
So what does it look like for a campaign to target parents, as indirect consumers of a show like Blippi?
The pilot advertiser for MPS is SharkNinja, a company that makes kitchen and home appliances like blenders and vacuums. SharkNinja’s CREAMi ice cream-maker was the product promoted in the Moonbug marketing campaign.
In one sponsored spot, the character Blippi makes ice cream out of carrot, coconut milk, fruit juices and agave. In another, it’s banana and spirulina powder. These marketing posts fit right in with other recent Blippi shorts, which are not sponsored, that involve eating or making actual ice cream or pretend making ice cream with clay. All the videos (sponsored and not) are Shorts, and some come from different Blippi accounts, all associated with the home channel, so they could easily end up playing back-to-back-to-back in an algorithmic feed.
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Kids are not clamoring for spirulina powder or carrot and coconut milk ice cream. But parents may be intrigued to find new ways to trick their kids into eating vegetables in some form.
MPS can also retarget parents in other channels, and with non-Blippi content. In this case, that might mean more conventional ads for CREAMi.
For instance, when AdExchanger covered a toothbrush and toothpaste licensing deal between CoComelon and Orajel in 2021, there were new brushing-your-teeth-related songs released on the CoComelon channel, which were not sponsored. The sponsored ads were produced by Moonbug but with actual live humans brushing their teeth and no overt relation to the kids show, other than echoing the language from the CoComelon toothbrushing videos.
Through these combinations of kids’ content production and parental retargeting, the adults can be reached with very targeted campaigns that “feel less like ads,” McAuliffe said.
Other MPS services
Some of what MPS does has nothing to do with the company’s IP, other than the fact that Moonbug is an expert YouTube operator.
For instance, while some brands might want to have direct engagements with characters or programs, there are other companies that turn to MPS to launch or operate their own branded channels, McAuliffe said. One such partner is the USPS, which, four months ago, restored an animated character called Mr. ZIP, created in the ’60s as part of a PSA to normalize the inclusion of five-digit ZIP codes on envelopes (not kidding here), for a new YouTube channel.
The only hint that Moonbug sits behind the USPS channel was a sponsored crossover video early on in which Blippi joined Mr. ZIP. Some of the videos have only a few thousand views, others have hundreds of thousands, and a few have cleared one million. [Verdict: It’s kinda cute.]
The discrepancy in viewership highlights something Moonbug has found – it can be hard to figure out what will resonate with kids and their parents. A yet-to-be-released study Moonbug is publishing on the state of parenthood found two out of five parents say that no brand has ever reflected their needs as a parent.
