Emma Witkowski, VP of Media Solutions at WildBrain, returns to the podcast for a conversation that started as a LinkedIn exchange between her and Jo about trust in kids media and grew into something worth doing properly on the podcast.

The central argument is one that feels obvious once it’s stated but is surprisingly underserved in the industry conversation: reach and trust are not the same thing. Just because a platform can put content in front of millions of kids doesn’t mean it has earned the relationship that makes that content — and the advertising around it — actually land. Emma breaks trust down into three layers: parental confidence in the environment, children’s familiarity with characters and creators, and advertiser confidence in brand-safe context. All three are needed, and none of them is guaranteed by scale alone.

• The conversation covers co-viewing as the most undervalued audience segment in advertising right now, Gen Alpha’s role as household CMO and their inbuilt spam filter for inauthentic brand behaviour, the case for branded content over programmatic placement, and why joy should be a KPI not just a creative nice-to-have. Emma’s closing line is the one worth sitting with: stop asking whether kids audiences are worth investing in and start building the right ways to invest in them — because the long-term sustainability of kids content is genuinely at risk.