A live recording from MIP Junior in Cannes, with Andy, Emily and Jo grabbing Jon Mason, founder of Jollywise and creator of Stan and Gran, for a conversation that cuts against the grain of most MIP conversations. Instead of talking about how to get a show made, Jon is asking whether the show is the right format at all — and whether the industry is measuring the wrong things entirely.

The provocation at the heart of the discussion is a LinkedIn article Jon wrote questioning whether dwell time and views are sufficient metrics for kids content, at a moment when a World Economic Forum white paper on AI and children is asking the same question from a policy direction. Jon’s argument is that the industry has allowed data that is easy to collect — clicks, completion rates, engagement — to become the only data that matters, when what actually counts is what a child does after the content ends. Whether they go outside, ask a question, make something, explore. That’s much harder to measure, but arguably much more important. Bluey, he notes, are starting to think about exactly this.

• The conversation ranges across screen-free AI products (Mallow, Freckle, Yoto), the gap between the ed-tech world and the kids IP world that MIP could usefully bridge, the risk of AI companions that are permanently available and relentlessly sycophantic, and Jon’s core creative mission with Stan and Gran: getting kids outside. His closing challenge to the room is a good one — does your IP have to be a TV show? And if the answer is yes, are you absolutely sure?

Welcome to this very special in person MIP junior recording of the Kids Media Club podcast.

I'm Emily Horgan.

I'm Jo Redfern and we have a special guest here at MIP Junior, Andy.

Who is it?

We do have very special guests.

We're joined by John Mason, who's the founder of Jollywise and the exec producer and creator of Stan Grand.

John, great to have you on the show.

Thank you very much.

Don't know if I'm that special, but thanks very much for inviting me.

You are too.

You are very special.

So we're all here at Mip Jr.

I was, I was reading one of the articles you'd recently posted on LinkedIn and it talked about it tied in a bit with something that Joe was talking about in one of the panels which is what's what comes after Kids tv.

And I thought your article set up an interesting argument that actually we could move beyond the metrics of attention and views to actually talking about how kids IP could be a catalyst for action and inspire kids to do something.

Could you kind of talk a little bit more about what was behind that article?

Sure.

I guess it's slightly anathema cause I spent 20 years of my life making content with screens for kids and I've just created a show that's going to be on screen.

But what I've been noticing probably the Last sort of 18 months, two years now is this sort of increasing trend towards maybe not screen free completely, but content that is using either audio or some way of getting kids to do other things outside of.

So this idea that technology should wrap itself around a child rather than actually kind of opening up what the world could possibly be is something that I'm really, really fascinated in.

And Will Weaver, who works with me, who's sort of our head of ux, he's also recently been giving a talk about is just one more go as a kind of maxim is reach, is engagement is dwell time as a measure something that is not necessarily harmful.

But is it the whole, is it the whole story?

Right.

And the World Economics Forum alongside that.

The World Economics Forum published a paper just a couple of days ago about AI and children.

And a lot of these screen free products that I'm seeing have some element of AI in them.

AI is obviously a very incredibly powerful tool.

Pretty much everybody uses it in some way, shape or form.

But I think I not necessarily the bogeyman.

I think used effectively sensibly with kids.

Well being center of the product design, I think it can be incredibly powerful, powerful tool.

So it's.

So the article is a bit, talks a little bit about all of those sorts of things really.

And I'm finding it really, really fascinating.

And I think the, the one thing that the children's media industry aren't really ready for and some of the recommendations from this white paper are that actually how are we going to be measuring.

How are we going to be measuring that?

It's very easy to measure a click through or how long someone stayed on a YouTube video when they dropped out and took another video.

But how hard is it going to be to measure?

A child plays an app and then is inspired to go and go in the woods with his mum and dad and go and you know, I don't know, make something from leaves or you know, as an example.

Yeah.

And standing ground's always been about trying to get kids outside.

So the whole, all of it sort of dovetailed quite nicely for me.

I was just like this is this all.

This all seems like something that's worth talking about.

Right.

I don't have a, I don't have a silver bullet, I don't have an answer.

I'm just sort of pointing to it and going, this is interesting stuff.

And you picked out a couple of products that you thought were in some ways indicators of that shift.

Yeah.

So there's a recent product called Mallow which is a screen free AI powered interactive story with games thing.

It looks like, it almost looks like one of those old school cone shaped microphones you used to use.

But at the top of it you can drop a character in, clicked in.

They've already done a deal with miraculous.

They've done a few deals with some ip.

They had a bit of grief as soon as you mentioned the word kids and AI in a sentence.

People just kind of just see red and just piling on LinkedIn going AI, you know, and actually the creators that.

Well, their claim is that, you know, it's very sensitively built.

They've rethought about it and you know, I mean, I guess the proofs, the proofs in the pudding.

Yeah.

And so, so you've got, you've got Mallow.

That's one.

Obviously you know, Tony's in yoto of have been doing screen free.

Yeah.

Entertainment for a while and they're definitely pushing into that interactive audio experience.

Not passive anymore.

So there are things that kids can lean forward and do, which I love, I really, really love that.

Obviously Lego Smart Play, they've got their, their interactive bricks and you know, so there are all these sort of products sort of pointing it in that one direction.

And the one that I really, really loved, which isn't available in the uk, it's only available in the us.

It's not launched yet.

It's called Freckle, which is a great name anyway, but it's, it's a smartphone for kids, but without dumping the entire smartphone OS on them.

Right.

So it's, it's literally it, it can take photographs, it can tell you what you're looking at.

It can send you out on adventures outside.

You can pair it with another one and they turn into walkie talkies.

There's no, there's only messaging on there to significant people that, you know, beautifully designed, really robust.

The, the marketing site is delicious and really gorgeous and, and it's just really, really interesting.

And then after the post, I've been.

So many people have been posting underneath it saying either thanks for pointing to this, but a lot of them are like ed tech gadget dudes, right.

Who are making stuff themselves and go, oh, this is, we're making this and we're making this.

And I guess we're at nipgenia right now.

And I think what's really interesting is most of the people that are liking and commenting on my post haven't stepped, haven't put a toenail inside a children's media conference.

Right.

And probably never will.

You know, there's a.

So they're out there making these products that are kid focused, kid centric, using AI for good or for ill, we don't know.

But they're out that industries exist.

It's out there over here.

Yeah.

Then we've got our, our little bubble over here where we're winning this conversation.

How do you think we can bring them closer together?

I think there are, I think there are some IP owners that are already looking at this and kind of going, I think if Peter Robinson had had his talk yesterday, I think there was this, this idea of like toy to screen product to screen as a thing, as a different.

You know, and I think people like Darren Garnham and the Tokyo, they've, you know, they're sort of starting at the other end of the food chain and going, we've made a thing and we, you know, a lot of these things are just, I would say inert.

A collectible is a kind of an inert squishy thing.

Yeah.

You know, it's, I haven't seen many products, but I'm sure I'll be corrected later in the comments on that that someone source created a digital product or digital ecosystem that is then found is going to find its way into the TV.

I think you might have even mentioned something on LinkedIn this morning, Emily, about products that are kind of coming at it from the other way.

I think IP creators, IP owners should certainly start looking at those sorts of technologies.

I'm doing it.

So I reached out to Freckle immediately and was like, hey, when are you in the uk?

You've built a technical, digital hard piece of hardware that is literally the manifestation of the stories that I'm trying to tell with Stan and Graham.

Yeah.

I'm trying to get kids to spend more time outside having adventures, joy, wonder.

And that's what Freckle does in a piece of hardware.

And I'm like, how can we give you stuff that will go on Freckle that.

You know?

So it's.

If you started that conversation even earlier.

Yeah, but it's.

But those sort of ed tech guys, they sort of exist over here and sort of kids.

IP creators sort of exist over there and never the twain sort of meet.

Because they're.

Because I think this industry is sort of preoccupied with a couple of things.

Organograms, which I won't get into, but there's certainly pretty much every conversation I hear in Cafe Roma is like people trying to work out the inside of an organization's organograms to find out who to talk to to get money.

Which is nuts.

The other one is like, you know, it's really hard out here.

How do we get our show made?

Yeah.

And.

And, or how do I get season.

Season two, season three.

Yeah, all of that.

And I. I've always sat on the outside of those conversations because I'm the digital guy and I'm the guy that people come to later.

Yeah.

And say, how do we.

How do we show up on digital?

And when I say digital, I'm quite vehemently against the idea that YouTube is digital.

Yes, it is.

It's a digital, but it's just another TV channel.

When I talk about digital, I talk about things that kids can actually touch, feel, play with, immerse, interact.

That's.

That's always been digital.

So that word digital got hijacked about 10 years ago by YouTube.

And just so people watch your digital strategy and then they say, we're going to put it on YouTube.

I'm like, that's not a digital strategy.

That's just a platform strategy.

So is the question maybe, like, should dwell time be the metric?

I think dwell time has to be somewhere in there, but it's like, how do we then measure what they did next?

The impact.

Yeah.

And this white paper from the Work Economic Forum obviously hasn't got any teeth, but what it's sort of saying is that it does have quite a large influence on what decision making happens within governments.

And it could be it's not my recommendation or my idea, but they've sort of said, is there a way where government, governmental bodies can actually turn around to creators?

People are making content for kids and saying, unless you've got some of these metrics baked into what it is that you're building or there is, or there is money for you, we can give you money if you can build a product that actually demonstrates that after like, you know, Ginny or Johnny did this and that, they then went on and did this and actually we're prepared to give you money for that.

Sort of institutionally, you know, I don't think it's going to affect the tech bros and what they do.

And we can get onto Zuck if you want and his little muse charm.

There's nothing amusing about it in my view.

But yeah, he's also called jolly, which is 50% of my brand name, which.

Is also cease and desist incoming.

No, I try.

I've already talked to my lawyer and they said given the, given the plaintiff on the other side of that particular legal argument.

John.

Yeah, I don't fancy a chance.

I just want to change the name.

Do you think that we've been measuring the wrong things or we've fallen into measuring the wrong things because of technology and that in turn has determined investment.

What you can measure becomes the yardstick for investment.

And what you're saying is we need to measure something differently and then we need to allocate investment going.

If you can prove these, that you're hitting these new markers, we'll put investment in.

Yeah, absolutely, 100%.

What you've said is absolutely is correct.

It's that everything's predicated by numbers and data.

You know, back in the old days, you know, you didn't have, you couldn't go on to GA and look up anything, you know, you needed.

You know, you paid analysts and researchers to tell you, you know, how your show was doing, how this was doing.

Now everybody sits behind data.

So yeah, so the advertising revenue sits behind data.

Show performance sits behind data.

Whether you get commission for a second series is behind data.

Getting a licensing deal sits behind data.

All sits behind data.

Data, data, data.

And all that data is around engagement and dwell time and like, you know, and like, but it, if you want, if we want to create better human beings, and I don't want to sound like an old hippie here, but if you want to create better human beings and I don't know, something that's a bit more sustainable, we have to figure out a way of measuring what happens after, you know, you know, so Bluey are doing something really interesting which is, will be coming out soon, but it's this, you know, how do you measure?

Like if you've watched three episodes of Bluey and you absolutely love the healer family and all that, you know, which inspires the family to go and do something else in the living room, it'd be great to measure that.

I don't think GDPR is going to let us do that job.

But also, you know, like, I hear the thesis but like families being families is, you know, the whole point and I don't know, the measurability of that is, you know, I see the benefit from the industry point of view, but it's like, you know, that's just, that's just the world happening and, you know, that deserves its own privacy too probably.

Yeah, sure.

I'm not, it's not suggesting that we need to monetize that metric.

I just think we need to be able to demonstrate that actually what we're doing.

Doing is, is for good.

Yeah, it's not, you know.

Yeah.

So if you get onto like AI sort of companions and that kind of thing, it's.

Is that, is that good or bad?

You know, and, and it, they already, I mean, Meta already knows so much about you.

You know, all of us sitting around this table, you know, podcasting our opinions.

So they're gonna scrape.

Yeah, but you know, but the amount of data points that Meta has taken off you over the last 15, nearly 20 years.

Yeah.

You know, and they're going to create a little AI powered gadget that's, that's going to learn even more from you.

From you.

And then, you know, then what's the natural, what's the extension of that?

You know, it's probably to sell, probably.

Gonna, it's just to sell you something that's such an inane end use.

Yeah, yeah, but so it's so I think AI companions that maybe have, that maybe stop a child from.

Inspire a kid to ask a teacher the answer to a question rather than getting it themselves or going outside.

I mean, it's a bit of a hippie dippy thing, but it's, but it's.

And I, well, I wonder whether it, it actually Rather than it being something that is pushing against what people want, it feels like there's been a bit of a shift in terms of the audience that now we're in, that we move from like that social media media graph to an interest media graph.

And what it means is that people end up doom scrolling in this hall of mirrors that is just reflecting back their interest.

So I think there is a desire to kind of break through that and get out into the real world.

So I think that IPs that kind of have a ladder.

Whereas whether it's from a TV show to kind of digital to then the real world, I think there's a real space for those IPS now.

Yeah, and not every IP has to be like that.

I mean a get a good game is a good game.

You know, I've just literally finished James Bond, you know, 88 hours in.

You know, my wife's like not that happy with me.

I always pretend that I'm playing with my 16 year old daughter, but when she comes into the living room, my daughter's nowhere to be seen, you know.

But yeah, so I love, I love gaming, you know, and I think great TV doesn't necessarily have to, you know, but there's, there's room for it.

And I think what my article is trying to point to is how do we measure it?

But also AI is one of these things that's sort of coming in now to go.

Well actually we can, we can create content that's completely screen free and you can still have a kind of a sort of IP adjacent type relationship.

Yeah.

With a character or with a story or with a world where you don't need a screen or anything.

It's just a sort of disembodied, you know, experience.

Life experience.

Yeah, yeah.

And, and you know, it's like.

So I guess the questions I was asking, like what happens when that gets really good?

You know what, what happens when they remember everything a kid's told them?

Now what happens when a child tells an AI that their parent hurts them?

You know, like safeguarding, like who's on the hook for that when, you know what happens when AI starts to initiate conversations with your kids rather than the other way around on all these things are up for grabs and Zuck will do all of them, I guarantee it, you know, and they're always available and they're always agreeable.

I mean, how much sycophant, how much, how sycophantic are AIs when you're prompting.

Oh, Emily, brilliant idea.

I would, you know, it's like just stop, stop blowing smoke up my back backside and just give me the answers that I want.

You know, there's all of that sort of stuff.

So it's that emotional attention thing that is I think is going to be a big battle coming up is like that.

You know, it's because it's.

It's more pernicious than doom scrolling.

Yeah, it's.

It's.

I also think there's a counterbalance, isn't it where the.

The technology kind of allows.

You just rely on AI to an enormous extent.

So you.

Within that new world you want to encourage kids to do stuff that outside of technology to kind of build those, those kind of emotional muscles and kind of way of looking at the world.

You want then that to kind of be developed outside of technology.

And it feels like the potential for AI to just answer every question.

The.

What you also want is to allow space for kids to.

Curiosity.

Yeah.

And there needs to be friction.

That's how you learn.

Yeah.

You know, I agree.

It's that.

I mean so I think there's definitely a massive space for IP that is a.

Is kind of.

It's.

You know, there's stuff that could be pure escapism but there's also stuff that opens the door into a kind of the real world to discover that.

And it feels like there's a space.

There's definitely a growing space for that.

Imagine.

Yeah.

Imagine you got a.

A character you created that was created in AI that became a companion built sensitively.

All the guardrails were in place, all that kind of thing.

And then actually you, it's like you, you create it as a character.

It's like at the minute it's a disembodied voice that kids talking and then actually oh, we will take that.

It's doing really, really well.

Look at all the, look at all the users we've got.

It's doing really well sales wise actually.

Let's go and talk to somebody and go.

We're actually going to create this in sort of flesh and blood or you know, we're going to crack.

We're going to create the character.

It's almost like going.

Coming the opposite way.

Yeah.

You know, where kids are already invested in the character and the storytelling and it doesn't actually exist, you know, as a, as a toy or a thing or whatever.

It's just a.

And then it becomes a thing.

You know, I think that's going to happen.

It's going to happen crystal ball gazing a bit.

What would you think Would, what would you like to see at somewhere like MIP in terms of kind of future programs and IP that made space for that?

I do think there's a, there's room for them to bring in like ed tech kids, tech into this, into the space.

Like just bring them in a bit, you know, offer them some like show people what's of what's available.

Yeah, it's, you know what, because it, what it does, it broadens people's kind of scope and the way they're thinking about, about things.

And there's a lot of money floating around in ed tech, you know, so, you know, if money's the kind of the, the overarching conversation here in kids media, which, you know, it is, there's, there's a lot of money swimming around in ed tech, you know, so it's.

And, and I'm not saying that their IP ideas are bad, but this is an industry that's got great decades and decades and decades of creating amazing content.

Yeah, tech have got, they've got a, you know, they haven't got decades because it's not, not been around, but that, you know, but kids learn through storytelling and we're the masters of that over here, aren't we?

The masters of storytelling.

So if the two worlds can kind of come together and actually you can get your show made or your thing made.

It doesn't have to be a show.

It could be a thing.

I always talk to people, when I talk to people with ip, I'm like, you know, does it have to be, does it have to be a show?

Can it be an app?

Could it be a game?

Can it be a thing?

Can it be something else?

You know, are you absolutely sat on it being a TV show?

Because that's really hard.

We have to uncouple from that format first thinking, don't we?

We just have to think about the characters in the world and what it's doing.

Yeah.

So I don't know, I see a world where, you know, there's a little edtech area and people can go along and meet and chat and go, oh, actually I've got this thing.

Oh, maybe that could be this.

Yeah, maybe this could help you with, with your literacy program.

And they go, oh, actually, well, we've actually got this huge grant that, that we, that, that we've got to, to, you know.

And it's like, all right, okay, well, that's really interesting.

So we can make up, we can get our thing made.

Yeah, it was going to be tv, but actually we're going to make it.

We're going to make it for this now.

Yeah.

And then maybe later down the line you can bring out back in and go, we made this thing for this thing, but actually we want to turn it.

I don't know.

It works.

Yeah.

And it works and it's proved and kids play with it and parents love it and educators like it and you know, and it's, it's in schools or it's wherever it is.

So yeah, it's, it's connecting those, the conversations and it's kind of, I guess I sort of sit at the intersection of that with sort of feet in both camps and.

Yeah.

But there are some really good examples of people who think really smartly about the way digital should be.

So people, you know, so super Y, we've just finished a big project for those guys.

We believe it or not, we started that project before Standing Ground went into production.

Right.

We've delivered 52 episodes.

Done.

They've just launched Superwire now because the amount of time and thought that they put into the show, but the digital extension of that was built hand in glove with the production.

Same with Carl the Collector.

So there are some forward thinking production companies that go, we want to bring the digital team in right here, right now because they can get the benefit of all the production assets.

They can talk to the writers, we can talk to the, we get the voiceover.

We don't have to go and find a sound alike in like four years time.

So there are some people thinking, but I'm just saying, you think even wider.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Well, there's the pitch for MIP next year.

You heard it here first.

Thank you very much for joining us today.

John Mason.

Andy, we're gonna let you do your usual thing.

Yeah, that was great.

Thanks very much for that and thanks to you guys for listening.

Please like and subscribe and watch and listen wherever you get your podcasts and we'll see you at the next one.