Mikael Shields, CEO of Acamar Films, shares Bing’s success story, discussing how the brand has scaled its digital and off-screen presence and steering the indie through the complex kids’ media ecosystem.
Based on the Bing Bunny picture book series by Ted Dewan, the International Emmy-winning CBeebies commission has sold widely around the world. Rooted in children’s development and emotional intelligence, Bing has built a thriving free-to-air footprint alongside a fast-growing digital and off-screen presence. Some stats to note: 11 billion YouTube views, with 1.5 million views daily in 130-plus countries; 13,000 pieces of content produced for YouTube, 6 million book sales.
“Young children are born with a brain that’s 50% adult size at nine months old,” Shields explains. “It’s a complete miracle. And between nine months and three years, they get a brain that grows from half to three-quarters adult size. All of that complexity is their personality, their memories, their emotions, and it’s driven hugely by language acquisition. They do that by repetition. That passionate devotion to one book or one show or one character. It is a very wide set of appetites for young children because they’re basically growing their synaptic material. You’re producing programming that’s at the right pace, where the noise picture is not too clamorous, where it might even be a little too gentle for an adult audience.”
The development of Bing involved experimenting with various formats before landing on 7-minute episodes. “We could tell a story where there’s an emotional narrative where Bing wants to do something, get somewhere, go somewhere. There’s a bang moment, the ears come down, and then we pause and there’s a reaction and he gets to feel his feelings. And with a bit of help from Flop or Amma, he gets to label his feelings. And then we get back to a steady state. So the narrative structure is very simple, but it’s highly effective for this audience because if they see Bing experiencing disappointment or jealousy or anger, and he comes out the other side safely and he gets to feel and label his feelings, that’s giving them really important equipment.”
Watch on YouTube below or on Spotify. Audio version available on Amazon Music.
The series continues to expand its free-to-air presence, with a raft of new distribution deals recently that takes the property into a greater number of markets outside of Western Europe. “What we want to do is basically expand our audience to make Bing into a global evergreen. And that takes time. These are long-distance journeys. And so that’s our key focus. And we’re working through a bunch of talented distribution agencies to make some of that stuff happen.”
As the landscape for children’s content evolves, so does the need for a robust distribution strategy. Acamar Films is working with BBC Studios’ brilliant digital team on the commercial strategy for Bing.
“The BBC Studios team has a leadership position when it comes to fandom and is at the leading edge of building audiences and curating audiences using digital platforms. We’re learning from them. We are a small independent company, and these are challenging times. Working with a big partner where they can take our programming and our assets and scale them up through their infrastructure is a fantastic opportunity for us. The BBC is big enough at scale to have a special relationship with YouTube, where they can sell their own advertising on their own digital inventory. We’ve plugged our digital inventory from our content management system into the BBC’s vast system. When that sales team go out to talk to an advertiser or a brand, our audience is part of the geography that they’ve got available to sell.”
Acamar has long been building Bing’s digital engagement via an app, blending linear programming with interactive gameplay. “The way we think of it is emotional scheduling; wherever the audience is, we want to be. We launched our app because we felt that that was a way of us communicating directly with our real stakeholders—grown-ups and young children. In terms of duration, the app represents about 50-50 between linear program viewing—all of our episodes are on it—and gameplay and interactivity. It gets a different type of behavior to a television screen. We see it as one of the key pillars of our long-term relationship with the audience.”
Off-screen, meanwhile, there have been deals across a range of categories, from publishing to toys. With Peter Bazalgette recently becoming the company’s executive chairman, the plan is to continue scaling the brand across multiple touchpoints, while also looking to develop new IP.
“We started off as a one IP company. In the servicing of that property, we’ve built a YouTube channels business and we’ve learned some new skills. We’ve always thought strategically about it. Over the next three to five years, you’ll see us diversify and try to capitalize on some of these skills to become a more secure, safe organization. We’ve changed our business model. We want to be a global organization doing what I would describe as public value content. We won’t be producing dopamine sugar, it’s not what we do. We think there’s a strategy to produce really high-quality, well-conceived, well-written entertainment content for children and to find a global audience for it. And so we want to get the chance to do more of that.
