In September, Simon Philips found himself in an uncomfortable situation: seated across the aisle from two small children on a 10-hour work flight from Los Angeles to London. “Oh, god. What are they going to do?” Philips remembers thinking. As a father of two, Philips knows how bored kids can behave. Moreover, he’s spent a career making and marketing toys at Marvel, Disney and, most recently, as managing director of Moonbug Entertainment, the parent company of YouTube sensations CoComelon and Blippi.
En route to England, Philips soon found he’d provided the answer to his own problem. “The minute they sat down, the parents put down an iPad with CoComelon and gave each of them CoComelon toys,” he said. The result: instant pacification. As for Phillips, the impact was even more profound: “When you actually see a kid playing with a toy, that’s the biggest sense of achievement somebody in this space can have.”
As YouTube, Instagram and TikTok creators increasingly lure kids away from the traditional cultural magnets of comic books, animated films and Saturday morning cartoons, the hit-hungry toy industry is following in kind. New toy lines based on online celebrities like 11-year-old YouTuber Ryan Kaji and branding empires like Moonbug are proliferating, opening up a new front in the holiday toy wars. Moonbug is by far the reigning king of kid merch with over $1 billion in retail sales this year; Kaji’s Ryan’s World is a distant runner-up with almost $200 million in sales.
