Netflix Kids Programming Exec Melissa Cobb On The One Question She Always Asks Creators

If you don’t have kids, you might not have been paying attention to what Netflix has been doing in the kids programming area, but it may be more prolific there than it is in programming for adults. It feels like a new show for presschoolers, grade-school kids, preteens or teens shows up on the service every day, in differing and unique formats. It could be a non-verbal cartoon short from India (Mighty Little Bheem) or a four-camera sitcom about a teen con artist out for revenge (No Good Nick). Instead of traditional 24-minute episodes, episodes of series could be anywhere from three to 15 minutes long.

Melissa Cobb —who, at the time Decider interviewed her, was Netflix’s VP of content in charge of kids’ programming, but now has the title of Vice President, Original Animation— is echoing Netflix’s general programming strategy: They want to be able to develop programming that’s appealing to a wide number of different audiences. If you have a preschooler who likes bright colors and fart jokes, there’s a show for that. If you want your kid to learn about shapes, there’s a show for that. If you want them to just be entertained while you do the dishes, there’s a show for that, too. Read on to find out more about what the service looks for, and the most important question she asks the creators she works with.

DECIDER: What attracted you to Netflix, and why did you decide to make the leap over to the programming side?

MELISSA COBB: I had been at Dreamworks for about 12, 13 years or something before coming here, mostly producing the Kung Fu Panda movies and was briefly living in Shanghai at the Dreamworks animations studio there which was actually a really great perspective on global entertainment and what it means to really come from a different vantage point as a creative. So a really valuable experience.

Prior to that I was at Fox Animation with Chris Meledandri and at Disney prior to that. So I’ve been in the kids and family space for a very long time. And I think one of the things that is very true in the kids and family space is that most studios or networks make a great effort to have a very specific brand identity, you know what I mean? The company is generally founded on principles that are around curating a type of content that’s very specific to that brand. So whether that’s Dreamworks, or that’s Fox, or that’s Disney, or that’s Nickelodeon, there’s a brand identity that when you’re creating content you’re really very conscious of.

The difference with Netflix, and one of the reasons that I was so excited to come here, was that it’s sort of the opposite which is it’s a service that’s based on choice. So the great thing about Netflix is that you can go on whatever mood you’re in you can find a show that sort of matches that mood whether you’re a kid, or whether you’re an adult.

And so the opportunity being here is that you can really create a hugely diverse plate. So you can work on different kinds of programs with different maybe creators, different tones, different styles, different audiences. So you’re really trying to create a portfolio of really diverse, different kinds of content so that everybody in the family can come there and find something they love.

What specifically did you learn at Dreamworks that translated over to when you took the job at Netflix?

This is a very specific thing but, I worked on Kung Fu Panda for a long time and tried very hard to create cultural authenticity — even though it’s a cartoon about a talking panda bear — but cultural authenticity to be true to the spirit of China, to be accurate in the detail, and to really try to capture a different culture. But then you actually move to that place and you’re suddenly looking back at the US from really a very different vantage point and spending time with creatives in a different country, and you realize that their storytelling references, their visual references, their sense of humor, their sense of justice, their sense of pride they’re all nuanced, and different because they’re coming from a different perspective and different culture.

I don’t know that I understood that until I was really there and then you start to look at that and you think about all of our audience, most of which are outside the US now, so a larger number outside the US than in the US, and you realize the importance of having different voices telling stories.

How did that point of view translate to what you brought to Netflix? When you came to Netflix what did you see in the kid’s programming, and what was in development then, and how did you work to bring it towards that more universal point of view?

Well there’s a number of things. One is that we were focused more on second run and licensed content when I first got here and the bigger shift, which is more of a business shift, is towards creating Netflix owned original content. And so that gives us more ability to curate the content and who the creators behind those shows are. We’ve also hired more internationally so we have an executive now based in Singapore, we have an executive based in Brazil, we have an executive based in Europe. And so we’re physically stretching out our team so that we’re able to identify content from all over the world.

How do you feel Netflix curates and presents kids programming differently than your two major competitors, Hulu and Amazon, and why do you think they don’t do it that way?

I guess I don’t really know exactly what is inside their thinking about how they approach it. I think what we’re doing is trying to get better all the time, to be honest. So we really look at how our audience is finding shows, and how they’re watching shows, what that discovery process is. We spend a lot of time with our younger members of the audience in research settings to really understand what is the interaction and then we’re constantly fine tuning it.

There’s subtle changes and subtle tests that we’re doing all the time to make that interface that your daughter sees better and better and to have that content that’s being presented to her more and more relevant to her. So the algorithm that runs Netflix, the user experience, is incredibly smart when you get under the hood and understand the thousands of engineers that are making that happen you realize that it’s very subtle, and very smart how it is figuring out what is appropriate and right for your daughter based on her viewing and whatever she most … you have given us about what might be appropriate for her.

Are you actually doing some sort of market research directly with kids or is it mostly through the data of how the viewers watch just like with the adult programming?

Well obviously a huge amount of it is through actual data of who’s watching what. We don’t have demographic data though. So if there’s a show, I don’t know, True and the Rainbow Kingdom, we understand how many people are watching it, and what countries they’re watching it in, that kind of thing but we don’t actually know who’s on the other side of that screen because we don’t gather any demographic data. So we can assume that it’s a four or five year old kid watching it but it may not be, right?

So in order to balance what is the quantitative data with more qualitative data we do do consumer insights research with actual kids in the room because their viewing habit is different, they may or may not be able to really control a remote. They may or may not be able to read yet, right? And so we want to make sure that we’re constantly making that experience more intuitive and natural for kids.

Like you say kids watch things differently. They watch the same episode over, and over, and over again because they want to, for instance. Is knowledge of those patterns brought out by the research, the data, or just the fact that whoever is in your staff are parents that they know that “My three year old wants to watch this episode of Motown Magic five thousand times”?

Yeah and I think everybody on my team has been in the family entertainment space for 20 or 30 years. We’re a pretty seasoned group of executives so there’s certain things that we believe we know and then we see what the actual behavior is, and I think that’s the really interesting part, which is we have that real-time feedback and it’s very … because it’s not a network that has certain kinds of shows at certain times the kids are much more in control of what they watch. They get to really pick. So something like Motown Magic, a kid is gonna see that art, and see that cute kid, and say, “I wanna watch that show.”

It’s really important to us that we have shows where kids can see themselves so that as they’re looking at a row of shows and they want to pick something they might say, “I want to pick something with a character that looks a little bit like me.” That causes us to really think like, “Okay we want to make that a rich and interesting experience and to give them that option,” so we for that reason have a pretty diverse, or we’re moving towards, I think, more and more diverse offerings.

Does the viewing patterns that you observed either through your market research or through the data mesh with the experience that you guys have in the family entertainment space, or was there a surprise that you didn’t think about?

I think there are little surprises all the time, meaning you can, in entertainment, lean into roles. Like, I don’t know, comedy doesn’t work very well outside the US, right? You might have sort of some little thing you’ve learned over time and then we see that change. We see, “Oh, here’s a very verbal comedy show but it’s working really well in Columbia.”

I think what in general Netflix has found is that people’s viewing isn’t as predictable as we might all wish it is. It’s much more personal and so everybody really that … when you give people the power to really pick what they watch they’re not always going to pick what you predict.

What’s a surprise in the kid’s space that you can talk about?

Okay there’s a show called Larva Island but look it up. It was based on a series of very short internet comedy animation pieces from South Korea, and our executive who is focusing on Asia saw this, and saw the popularity, and was like, “Oh maybe we can make some kind of longer format stories with these.” They’re basically brightly-colored larva that are very silly. It’s non-verbal; it’s all physical comedy, and it sounded like a really interesting bet. We thought, “Well, that seems like we’ve already established that it’s going to do well in Korea and so that seems like a great bet to take.” So we produced that and it ended up resonating all over the world in ways we absolutely didn’t expect, even though afterwards you can be like, “Well it’s physical comedy and a lot of fart jokes and things.”

But that’s an example where I don’t think a network would’ve said like, “Let’s bet on this, let’s put a big bet behind this.” Because how would you know? But it’s happening, people are watching it, it’s fantastic, we love surprises like that.

You’ve also been playing with some of the formats here and there. Instead of two, 12-minute segments, for instance, Motown Magic has individual 12-to-15 minutes episodes. What makes you decide how to format it? Are you just still playing with the formats to see what works? What’s been the impetus behind that?

Part of it is discovery, part of it is playing with the format to see what works. So when I first got here and we were more leaning into licensed [shows] there is a 11 minute, 22 minute that is driven by commercial breaks. And so that’s just naturally how creators even for us, we come in with a pitch and I think we really decided to challenge that and to think about whether we could take that same number of minutes that you might use for a season and break it up in different ways.

And so we really pushed the creators to think about what’s the right length for any given piece of content. So that’s why with Motown you’ll see some are shorter, some are longer. What do they think the right length is to tell that story? There’s also a show True and the Rainbow Kingdom which your daughter should take a look at if she wants, super cute. That’s one where we’ve done little bite-sized things like music videos, or really short format because we know there is anecdotally that habit that kids have of liking to just find their favorite thing and watch it over and over again. And so we are definitely in a period where we really wanna try some pretty different formats, part of our growth and innovation.

Is the goal to bring in shows and creators that are doing something a little unique? When someone comes in to you with a pitch what do you tell them, what questions do you ask them?

In general I think what we’re really asking for is for people to have a strong personal vision for what they want to do rather than to sort of follow prescribed network formula. We will often challenge them to go back and really think about “What is the version of this story that I want to tell?” And so that generally opens up their mind in a way that isn’t often encouraged so because of that we really hope that we have shows that are each very distinct, we don’t want a lot of shows that look and feel the same. We want a real broad range of shows.

With some of the shows geared towards the really young kids, all the ones that are TV-Y as opposed to TV-Y7, what is your goal? There’s obviously got to be some sort of informational, educational goal in developing these. 

The preschool shows or the shows for younger kids, are generally a lot of the ones that we have are more social/emotional development, to help kids kinda see experiences that they may be struggling with. Whether that’s sharing, or being kind, or having to go to bed on time, or being able to take their nap, things that kids can relate to and then help see different types of solutions. So we definitely think about that, the child’s development state at the age we’re presuming that they’re watching.

We have a few shows that are a little bit more specific [kinds of] learning, like Word Party, which is a show that actually teaches some words, or Story Bots which answers questions about things like how computers work, but in a very entertaining way. So we like to have a mix of shows that are just pure silly entertainment, shows that are a little bit more social/emotional group oriented, and then a little bit more learning types of shows.

What’s your goal with the preteen and teen programming, because a lot of it feels like it could be shows that adults could watch, the beats are very similar to adult series, the dialogue is very sophisticated. How difficult is it to try to find creators who can aim these shows both ways? 

Again, that just goes to us really trying to find some of the most interesting and kinda forward thinking creators out there. Like we’ve made a deal with Hirsch who has sort of lived in that space of things that are so clever that pretty much any age can enjoy them, or Chris Nee who’s doing some of the most interesting and innovative preschool shows out there. So we really try to give creators a lot of berth to lean into their voice and it’s about hiring those people that have that voice. So it’s not necessarily intentional, meaning we don’t say we need something that has this type of writing, let’s go find somebody. We really go to creators and say, “What are you excited about doing?”

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, VanityFair.com, Playboy.com, Fast Company’s Co.Create and elsewhere.