Former Disney executives Kevin Mayer and Tom Staggs have made 10 acquisitions, starting with Reese Witherspoon's Hello Sunshine and a minority investment in Westbrook from Will and Jada Pinkett Smith, since they launched their Blackstone-backed media company Candle Media in 2021.
But CEOs Mayer and Staggs told Variety's co-editor in chief Cynthia Littleton at Variety's Entertainment Summit at CES on Friday that the success of their strategy is to balance assets tied to the biggest names with content that it hits "above its weight", as it did for Moonbug Entertainment, which produces the hit children's series “CoComelon”.
A consistent presence on Netflix's weekly Top 10 English-language TV series list, Staggs described the value of "CoComelon" to Candle Media this way: "On a relative scale, it's not the most expensive show we've got, but it's important, and that's what we like, we like programming that really matters to distributors,” Staggs said.
Like the purchases of Hello Sunshine, Faraway Road Productions, and ATTN:, Mayer and Staggs view Moonbug as a company that offers a desired product or unique content to a specific consumer demographic that can then be monetized in other ways.
Stars: Kristen Princiotta, Ava Madison Gray, Hannah An
“René Rechtman, who founded Moonbug, worked for us at Disney for a long time,” Mayer said. “He came up with an idea while he was there and said, ‘There are audiences that just don't come to the Disney Channel anymore, they go to YouTube, and very specifically YouTube. And many parents are parking their kids in front of an iPad and turning on YouTube and finding great content. And this content is completely original.'”
Enter "CoComelon," created by Jay Jeon, a father of two in Southern California.
“He was a retired engineer, and out of a hobby, he created ‘CoComelon,'” Mayer said. “It's a good 3D animation, not everyone could do it, but he was able to do it, he had technical experience and he made this great animation. And alone, he put out one video a month as a six to eight minute video on his channel and hit 60 million subscribers after a few years. Then Moonbug buys it, and that was two years ago, and now that it has 60 million subscribers, because of the techniques that we have at Moonbug to grow the audience and feed the right content and understand what the audience wants, when they want it, and as. to populate the channel really well, it's reaching 150 million subscribers. 'CoComelon' is the biggest YouTube channel in the world, bigger than Mr. Beast, which has like 110 million. Bigger than anything else. And while he was doing that, he took those same shows, repackaged them into hour-long episodes, 10 of them, and licensed them to Netflix. They are also available for free on YouTube. And it was the second most streamed show on Netflix last year, with "Criminal Minds" being the most streamed. So we'll see what happens this year, but now there are all the licensing and merchandising opportunities."
Staggs added: “Recently, late last year, they hosted ‘CoComelon Animal Time’ on YouTube. And after four months, I think he had 2 billion minutes on YouTube in December. So an offshoot of that franchise, it continues to build that ecosystem, if you will. That's what we mean when we say find these things that have a real opportunity and then try to build the brand."
“People thought this was a crazy Donald Trump moment, and that's what went along with all the frenzy in the summer of 2020 when I was there [as CEO]… It's been kind of amazing to me, I thought it was all over, And in the background, there have still been these concerns, and now we have a Democratic administration, which is voicing similar, if not stronger, concerns,” Mayer said. “I don't know, I never actually went to our offices in China. This was all during the pandemic, it was all Zoom. I don't know what exactly the concerns are, I don't know how real they are. But I do know that the concerns have been pretty persistent, and they've gone from Trump to Biden and it doesn't seem to have eased much. So I'm not sure what to say about it, I don't have any particularly good ideas about it. I'm noticing, like everyone else, that there seem to be some substantial concerns."
Speaking more about his previous work, Mayer and Staggs offered their thoughts on Disney CEO Bob Iger, whom Mayer served at Disney as president of direct-to-consumer and Staggs works.
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