BoodleBobs Animation & Children’s Book Series

www.boodlebobs.com

Boodlebobs are a set of 26 short stories written by children’s author Jo Kemp. Jo wrote the original scripts for Chorlton and the Wheelies and Jamie and the Magic Torch in the late 70’s where she adopted a gentle, narrative style with little regard for political correctness and both series attracted a cult following.

We wanted to develop our animation skills in motion graphics and character animation whilst developing our own brand. Created with Adobe creative cloud, the tools we typically use within the suite are Audition for the audio. Illustrator, Photoshop for the backgrounds and character designs. Character animator for the digital puppets and performances. After Effects and Premiere for putting it all together and final editing.

Each story consists of around 600 words and takes Luke 2-3 weeks to animate once the audio guide track is complete. The BoodleBobs cartoons are good examples of low budget animation.

Lessons we have learned in YouTube

We have learned invaluable lessons from running a YouTube channel whilst creating the BoodleBobs cartoons.

With 300 hours of video uploaded to YouTube every minute, it is difficult to get the content served.
SEO in YouTube starts with research & planning for a video, good thumbnails & titles are the best bit of SEO you can do for increasing click rates.
Videos getting on pushed by YouTube are done so on a criteria of acceleration, inbound links, watch time & engagement.
The cost of promotion on YouTube is a fraction of what you would spend on other Ad channels like FaceBook or in Googles search network

Hours per month

CREATIVE CLOUD
Website Drupal 7 To WordPress
YouTube channel management
Cartoons, E-books, Podcasts, Music, Publishing
Continuous brand development
Animated using the tools in Adobe ‘s creative cloud

RATE CARD

Project Stage 2 – Granny Annie Book Launch 2021

Research indicated that multiple story characters lead to brand confusion. To rectify this we have introduced Granny Annie into the role of story narrator. This has significant advantages for improving the pace of the cartoons as well as simplifying the animation process.

Publication: Granny Annie’s Ultimate Alphabet Book

Publisher: SEO-Hampshire/BoodleBobs
Author: Jo Kemp
Illustrator / Animator: Luke Kemp

BUY NOW – GRANNY ANNIE’S ULTIMATE ALPHABET BOOK

Project Stage 1 – Content Creation

Two years ago our first few cartoons were very basic, the hardware (An 8-year-old mac) was insufficient for the task. A lack of knowledge was only overcome with boundless enthusiasm and some fantastic ‘how too’ tutorials found online. Since then our hardware has been upgraded and skills have developed exponentially.

BoodleBobs in 2020

Two key factors (COPPA & Keyword research) have influenced our decision to shift focus from creating entire cartoons, to simply focusing on creating picture books and podcasts. In doing so we hope to complete the online publication of the remaining 12 stories in 2020

A new version of the BoodleBobs website has just been put in to live (July 2020) and contains storybook downloads in English, Spanish, Hindi, Mandarin and Arabic. Podcast downloads are available in English only (so far).

Visit the new-look BoodleBobs website here. www.boodlebobs.com

COPPA Law Starts 6th Jan 2020

Coppa stands for the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act. And is about the collection of data from a child without adult consent.

More info on COPPA

Personal identifiers (Cookies) have been served to devices used by children which enable the running of lucrative personalised Ads.

Contextualized Ads Vs Personalised Ads
A personalised Ad is where Google looks at the viewer’s data and serves an Ad based on their viewing history
A contextualized Ad is similar to the Ads you would see if you switch on a traditional TV

The collection of this data (cookies) has been found to be in breach of the coppa law and all American owned tech companies (Google, Facebook, Twitter, etc) will put in measures to comply in 2020.

The focus of responsibility has shifted to the content creators who can face up to $46,000 for incorrectly marking their content. Content that is designated for kids will lose key functionality needed for growth within YouTube. If Ads run, they will be contextual Ads, not personalised Ads. Revenue is expected to drop in the region of 60% to 80%.

Definition of what’s made for kids,

What is the subject matter of your video?
Whether children are your intended audience for the video
Whether the video includes child actors or models
Whether the video includes characters, celebrities or toys that appeal to children, including animated characters or cartoon figures.
Whether the language of the video is intended for children to understand
Whether the video includes activities that appeal to children
Whether the video includes songs, stories, or poems that appeals to children

Keyword Researh

Keyword research has shown us a far better way. Intelligent business decisions from real-world data.

Keyword research in action,

An easier way with 5 x the value. Keyword research has shown that the CPM (Revenue earned from 1000 views) for targeting bedtime story audiobooks & podcasts is far greater than that of cartoons.

These two examples from YouTube Channel analytics show the CPM in December for the same story, Nigel the Niggly Napkin (cartoon and podcast versions)

Its the same audio just different visuals and targeted titles and key terms.

We see a similar pattern of the value similar key terms across the different platforms. In changing and simplifying our format, we can release content that has a greater value in a fraction of the time and cost.