South Korea’s The Pinkfong Company may be best known for the most-watched video of all time on YouTube, but it has ambitions well beyond the viral Baby Shark Dance, Dave Levy, head of studio at Pinkfong USA, tells ScreenMDM Talks.
Levy joined the company in 2023 to lead development and production for original short-form and long-form IP at its U.S. outpost. With a current slate that includes The Big Book of Bebefinn with Amazon Kids+, Levy was a guest on ScreenMDM Talks’ Gen A to Z strand to weigh in on brand-building, developing for digital-first versus “traditional” commissioners, and the overall state of the kids’ business today.
Levy arrived at Pinkfong to help scale the company’s U.S. content slate after its first foray into long-form, Baby Shark’s Big Show! on Nickelodeon. “There’s this vast YouTube network at Pinkfong,” Levy says on the episode, available on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts. “We have this immense audience—150 million subscribers across 25 channels—where we have the means to produce content, distribute content, fund content, and build a franchise around that content.”
Short-form vs. long-form:
“The series engine is really different. How big is your cast? How big is your world? How intimate are your stories versus how much room do you have? How many locations do you have? The scope is the big difference there. So when we’re developing something to start in short form, it’s a much more lean proposition. Would this perform well on YouTube? What is the exact age demo, and what other shows are successful in that demo that we can learn from? We try to tag it for one or the other from the beginning.”
Digital-first advantages:
“There aren’t gatekeepers; you really can experiment. You have all this data and analytics at your grasp, and you can immediately pivot and try different things and build it as you’re making it, as opposed to how it was done before, where everything was never seen until it broadcast. Another nice benefit is the leverage and ownership.”
The kids’ sector today:
“We’re really lucky that we have this YouTube network that acts like a secondary potential marketing arm for things we might do in long form. So that’s not a bad thing to have behind you when you go to a streamer with a long-form pitch. We announced in June that we are doing our first long-form project with Amazon Kids+, The Big Book of Bebefinn, based on our Bebefinn YouTube show, which launched in 2022. We proposed a seven-minute long-form version of that show that’s more narrative and still musical. We’re in production on that now.”
Co-production opportunities:
“We meet with international studios all the time. What would it take to have a show on CBeebies, and how do we have a show on ABC in Australia? How would we collaborate with a local studio there to make that authentic content and make it part of that mandate of what they want and need?”
The next entertainment frontier for kids:
“I think in some cases they’ll go without their screen. It’ll be podcasts or Tonies; the audio experience is pretty darn great. You can use your imagination and fall in love with something without even seeing it; experiencing it the way you see it in your head could be really special. Publishing is still a great place to start. Instagram and TikTok are certainly ways to reach parents or caregivers of kids and seed some characters that they might want to share with their littles on those platforms. Roblox too. There are all these places where stories are being told, and content is emerging.”
