Animaj Co-Founder Greg Dray joins ScreenMDM to discuss how the company is driving new models across the production, development, and monetization of kids’ and family content, including through its landmark Lumee joint venture with Hasbro Entertainment.
After ten years at YouTube, Dray teamed up with Sixte de Vauplane in 2022 to found Animaj, a next-generation kids’ and family media company. In this wide-ranging conversation for ScreenMDM’s Gen A to Z strand, Dray is clear about the company’s remit: in an era when the “traditional” model for kids’ media is broken, reinvention is paramount for survival.
“The old model is dead, it’s not going to come back,” Dray said. “We have to embrace not just the future, but the present. We must embrace change and be ready to test, learn, and iterate all the time for the industry to regain its footing and rebound.”
Unlearn and relearn, Dray said.
Dray laid out how Animaj is embracing the future, from finding innovative ways to mine classic IPs like Pocoyo and Maya the Bee to partnering with Hasbro Entertainment on an ad-sales venture for kids’ content on YouTube to deploying its Sketch to Motion tool to assist its animators.
To understand how Animaj is defining the next generation of kids’ media companies, watch the conversation with Dray below on YouTube. We are also on Spotify and Amazon Music.
Animaj was founded to serve as a blueprint for the next generation of media companies, betting on YouTube, AI, and other models to solve the discovery, time, investment, and monetization conundrums plaguing the sector over the last few years.
YouTube reaches an estimated 400 million children monthly (excluding China) worldwide, Dray says, but the shift it made in privacy and advertising policies in 2020 “left a void because all of a sudden, monetization on YouTube for kids’ content lost 50% on average for the category overnight. Today, you can generate billions and billions of views. It’s not going move the needle when it comes to revenue generation.
“The media business is about monetizing engagement and monetizing attention,” Dray continued. “Today, the attention and the engagement are on YouTube. We need to find a way to monetize where the attention is, where the engagement is.”
To address this issue, Animaj has set up a joint venture with Hasbro Entertainment for an ad sales and brand partnerships venture called Lumee, leveraging a combined slate that generates 55 billion views on YouTube annually. “We are launching with the most comprehensive demographic footprint in the industry,” Dray said, from preschool to teens.
Lumee serves as a direct response to the “black box” of programmatic buying. By offering video-by-video visibility, it solves the brand safety crisis that has deterred some advertisers from the kids’ space.
Animaj is also driving innovation in animation technology by leveraging AI. Dray stresses that the mandate is to use it as a tool for empowerment and speed, rather than a cost-cutting replacement for human talent.
Powered by an $85 million investment round last year from HarbourView Equity Partners, the team at Animaj, across its London, Paris, and Madrid hubs, is keen to keep reinventing the wheel and working with others in the industry—producers, competitors, data organizations, advertisers—to ensure that kids can continue to benefit from high-quality content across the screens they are on.
This episode is brought to you by MIP LONDON, which is hosting a comprehensive Kids & Teens Summit as part of its overall agenda. Find out more here.
