Hasbro Entertainment and Animaj have joined forces for an ad-sales and brand-partnerships venture called Lumee, an initiative that Gregory Dray, its chairman, tells me is a concerted effort to tackle what he sees as the biggest roadblock in the kids’ business: monetizing YouTube engagement.
Lumee brings together the Hasbro Entertainment and Animaj slates to create a broad, multi-demo, premium-quality advertising inventory, with analytics tools to help clients understand their ROI. The venture will offer advertising across YouTube and CTV, with contextual, COPPA-compliant campaigns, plus original and branded content capabilities, powered by Animaj’s AI-assisted production workflows.
The combined content slate includes hits like Peppa Pig, Pocoyo, PJ Masks, My Little Pony, Maya the Bee, Transformers, Rabbids, and Power Rangers. Across their content slates, Hasbro and Animaj generated more than 50 billion annual views on YouTube.
“With Lumee, we are building a bridge between advertisers and a new generation of digital-native kids,” said Sixte de Vauplane, co-founder and CEO of Animaj.
“Hasbro is committed to delivering exceptional play and entertainment experiences,” said Yannick Ferrero, SVP of digital and distribution at Hasbro Entertainment. “Our joint venture with Animaj is a strategic move to maximize the value of our premier kids brands for advertisers, while ensuring digital interactions are valuable, safe, and inspiring for our audiences.”
“By unifying some of the world’s most respected and successful kids IPs under a single ad sales offering, we are delivering what family advertisers have been asking for: a solution delivering scale, engagement, and brand safety across digital platforms,” said Dray, co-founder of Animaj and chairman of Lumee.
“The media business is about monetizing engagement and monetizing attention,” Dray told me as we were filming the latest episode of ScreenMDM Talks’ Gen A to Z strand, which comes out on Monday. “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.”
And YouTube monetization in the kids’ space is complicated, Dray continues, referencing the January 2020 change in privacy policies and targeted, personalized advertising around kids’ content. “It was absolutely necessary for privacy, but it 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.”
Per Dray—who wrote a detailed LinkedIn post further explaining the rationale for Lumee—kids and family content on YouTube represents 15% of its overall viewership but less than 2% of revenues. “It’s difficult to break this cycle. Only a very small number of companies can solve that problem,”—namely, the likes of Animaj, Moonbug Entertainment, and WildBrain, among others, that can commercialize their own inventories on the platform. “You need to be able to have an ad-sales and brand-partnerships team. It’s a different world, a different business. And add to this the constraints of the kids and family space. It’s impossible for anyone to solve the problem on their own. We have to join forces. We need to work together as an industry.”
Beyond the scale of its footprint and quality of the inventory, Dray highlights other key differentiators for Lumee, including its focus on transparency.
“I think this is probably the first time you’ll see a sales house going so far in terms of transparency and simplicity with a view to reinventing contextual advertising at scale. We will provide brands and agencies with video-by-video visibility, ensuring that they know exactly which premium content their brands are supporting. This is absolutely critical in a context where brand safety on YouTube has always been a hot topic. And when you buy programmatically, you don’t have a perfect understanding of what your ads, as an advertiser, are running against. So not only are we bringing to the table premium, iconic, and established IPs, but we will also go one step further by providing agencies and advertisers with total visibility on the placements of their ads against our content. The other differentiator, and this is why we believe that this alliance with Hasbro makes a lot of sense, is that together we are covering the entire journey of childhood. We are launching with the most comprehensive demographic footprint in the industry.”
For Dray, collaboration within the industry is paramount. “We are also really committed, with industry partners, to help develop new COPPA-compliant measurement standards that can prove view-to-retail lift without ever touching personal data. I strongly believe that, by coming together as an industry with industry partners and measurement companies, we need to find ways to better measure the kids and family audience without ever touching personal data. It’s about proving ROI, without ever compromising a child’s privacy. This joint venture with Hasbro is really about building the IP monetization engine of the present and of the future.”
That will help preserve the health of the ecosystem going forward, Dray said in his LinkedIn post: “Every brand dollar flowing through Lumee is a reinvestment into safe, inspiring, and high-production-value content. If broadcasters or streamers don’t commission the next great story, we will.”
