Ivan Agenjo, CEO and Executive Producer of Peekaboo Animation, spoke with ttvnews about the challenges of producing content in today’s industry, where productions must be thoughtful and innovative, such as its star format, Escucha tu cuerpo, which combines entertainment with education in a fun way.
More and more platforms, channels, screens and applications designed to deliver content make content more dispersed than ever, making it difficult for viewers to find what they want to see and for producers to make their productions stand out in a sea of new releases.
Faced with this great challenge, producers, especially independent ones, must adjust their strategies, generating “more thoughtful, more worked-out products, with increasingly complex development, and with adjusted production costs.”
This was explained to ttvnews by Ivan Agenjo, CEO and Executive Producer of Peekaboo Animation, who shared his vision of the current state of the industry, the challenges of producing content for children, and the latest additions to its catalogue for the market.
What is your current vision of the children’s content industry? What do you think will be the main trends in terms of genres and productions for 2025?
The children’s content industry has never had so many possibilities to reach children, but precisely this dispersion of the audience implies at the same time trying to adapt the content to the type of channel through which the audience will consume it. In terms of trends, there is still room to exploit known IPs, I think the market will continue to be conservative and will continue to bet on this content for large television projects. Comedy will continue to be the most in demand both in preschool and in higher targets, especially if we are talking about content that lives in the digital world or AVOD platforms.
What are the main challenges of producing children’s content today?
The industry is going through a time of very significant changes that mean that we all have to adjust to a new paradigm. The demand for content is growing, but it is dispersed, and that complicates the financing of projects. At the same time, producers have to offer more thought-out, more elaborate products, with an increasingly complex development, and with adjusted production costs despite the inflationary environment. If we add to this the emergence of AI, which we have to learn to integrate to streamline processes without harming the creative process, we are faced with a panorama that involves a lot of planning.
What do you look for when selecting projects for your catalogue? What are the star titles in your current catalogue for the international market?
At Peekaboo we always look for content that can be attractive to audiences around the world, with universal themes and characters. And at the same time we are committed to a graphic or visual proposal that is attractive, colorful and fresh, that is a bit of a hallmark of our studio, that is where we feel strongest. Our flagship project in the catalogue, which has already been completed for this year, is Escucha tu cuerpo, an entertainment format that combines filming on set with animation capsules and that talks to children about the human body in a fun way, through attractive and suggestive questions, such as “why do we have snot? What is pee for? How does the heart work?” The show premiered in September on TV Cataluña and both the format and the finished title are available to adapt to other territories and languages.
In this sense, with which platforms and territories do you currently work? In which regions do you think there is the greatest potential for growth of your content?
Our natural market is Europe, we usually work in co-production with linear channels and VOD platforms in European territories. We currently have co-productions underway or in development with France, Italy, Portugal, Belgium and Ireland, mostly through public channels. We are also looking to increase our collaboration with Latin America, which would be our second most important market, although it is a region in which differences in deadlines and budgets make co-production more complicated. Given the lower activity of traditional television in that part of the world, we are trying to grow by licensing content to new players in the region, smaller but specialized.
How do you see the evolution of children’s content and younger audiences in the coming years?
Again, the problem facing the industry is that the audience is dispersed, traditional channels are no longer the place where children or young people consume content, but instead they are still the main financiers. And new consumption windows do not have or do not want to contribute to the creation of new quality content. This vicious cycle is what we have to break in order to find a way to continue generating quality content that reaches young audiences. From the position of an independent producer it is always more complicated than from a major one, so collaboration with other companies as well as government support is essential to promote cultural diversity and stories from all origins.
