Listening to young audiences: In conversation with Will & Agency

How can film and media professionals truly understand young audiences beyond what they click, watch or buy?

Young people move effortlessly between films, games, social media and online communities, but conventional audience data captures only part of that experience. We spoke with Rikke Flodin and Jesper Thomsen from Will & Agency/PUBLIKUM about bringing young audiences into the creative process, the development of XAVAGE and their ongoing partnership with Cinekid.

They also discuss the PUBLIKUM Audience Awareness Award and share what children understand about storytelling that adults in the industry may sometimes overlook.

Could you briefly introduce Will & Agency/PUBLIKUM and tell us about your respective roles within the company?

Rikke Flodin is Partner and Head of Audience Insights: she leads our audience research across projects, translating what we learn from real audiences into practical insight for creatives and key stakeholders. Over the last years, she has specialised in reaching young audiences, using digital tools and anthropological methods to facilitate direct conversations with them. She holds an MSc in Anthropology.

Jesper Thomsen is Co-Founder and Partner of PUBLIKUM. As co-founder and partner, Jesper is deeply embedded in the company's work on digital tools and AI-assisted audience intelligence, including partnerships with Perspective Fund's Envision Impact Lab, Screen Australia and the XAVAGE-project funded by the EU Innovation Lab. He holds an MA in Information Studies.

Jesper: Will & Agency is a Copenhagen-based research and strategy agency working at the intersection of anthropology, data and AI, and PUBLIKUM is our audience initiative for the European creative and cultural sector, with a particular focus on film and TV today. PUBLIKUM was born out of a simple question: how do we bring real audience voices into the creative process from script and story development all the way through to positioning and release?

Since PUBLIKUM launched in 2021, we've combined anthropological fieldwork with AI-supported analysis to help creatives, producers and funders understand how audiences actually feel about their stories, and how they engage with them. We like to say that we use AI to support anthropology, not the other way around. Today we've worked on 200+ projects across 15 countries in film, TV, streaming, gaming, museums and sport, drawing on a global panel of more than 8,000 active cinemagoers. Most recently, our work has grown into XAVAGE, a new development project taking PUBLIKUM's approach beyond film and TV into the wider youth culture space.

What gap in the industry is XAVAGE designed to address, and how does it draw on your existing audience research?

Jesper: Across film, TV, gaming, publishing and museums, competition for young people's attention has never been higher - everyone wants to reach and engage Gen Z and Generation Alpha, but their cultural lives no longer sit inside one format or institution. A child might discover a story in a game, learn history through a meme, or build part of their identity in a fandom on TikTok or Discord. Platform metrics can tell an industry what young people click on, watch or buy, but not why they cared.

XAVAGE is a new development project within PUBLIKUM, designed to close that gap. Rather than researching a project once it's already finished, when there's little left to change, XAVAGE brings young audiences directly into the development process itself testing stories, characters and scripts with them while a project is still being shaped, so the insight can actually inform creative decisions instead of just validating them afterwards. This matters especially for young audiences, because their expectations are high.

Rikke: The young audiences have a real appetite for plot twists and surprises, and they're sharp readers of structure: in our research, children can guess the ending of a story roughly 8 times out of 10, from reading only the first few pages of a script.

Jesper: XAVAGE draws directly on what PUBLIKUM has learned through years of audience research, including our KIDS Regio study and 80+ projects on youth engagement, to help creators build in the surprise, complexity and payoff that keep young audiences hooked, rather than one step ahead of the story.

How did your partnership with Cinekid begin, and what makes Cinekid an interesting partner for your audience research?

Rikke: We've been partners with Cinekid's Producers Link during several editions, and it was through those conversations that we started talking about how we could build a deeper collaboration with Cinekid more broadly. Around 30% of all the film and series projects we work on at PUBLIKUM are aimed at young audiences, so Cinekid is a genuinely important partner for us. It's the most significant event for content creators working for young audiences in Europe, and a place where we get to meet international filmmakers who are all working toward the same goal: creating great content for kids. It's a place to be inspired and meet kindred spirits across the industry.

I love being at Cinekid, with the atmosphere in Pathé with the visiting children and the energy of the Media Lab. It's such a great reminder of who we're really developing the content for. It’s Jesper’s first time at Cinekid, and I’m excited for him to experience what I’ve been talking about for the last 4 years.

This year, with our new project XAVAGE, we hope to be even more involved in the Media Lab as well, not only the industry-facing Cinekid activities.

We've also been fortunate to take part in a number of panels and roundtable discussions at Cinekid since 2023, where we also introduced our Audience Awareness Award. And as part of our wider collaboration with KIDS Regio on the pan-European research project “Keeping Up with Children as an Audience,” we had the honour of launching the full report during Cinekid 2024, in the Opening Keynote. The study, which was the first of its kind, combined qualitative and quantitative methods with 374 children aged 7–11 across 12 countries. For us, Cinekid is an important hub for knowledge and inspiration, and it felt good to be able to give something back to that community.

Could you tell us more about the Audience Award and the role young audiences play in selecting the winner?

Rikke: The PUBLIKUM Audience Awareness Award winner is chosen based on the insight and pattern-recognition we've built up from more than 80 research projects specifically about what drives engagement among Europe's youngest audiences. During the Junior Co-Production Market, we pay close attention to how the selected projects are pitched: who the project is for, why young audiences would want to watch it, what emotional need it meets, and how clearly the team understands its audience. It's our way of rewarding not just a good idea, but a demonstrated understanding of the audience behind it, and then helping that project reach and engage its audience through a structured understanding of that audience and the markets that matter to it.

The award itself represents €9,000 worth of audience research, and we're proud that it's become part of how Cinekid's Junior Co-Production Market recognises audience-centred thinking in what is a very competitive market. Understanding exactly who you're making a project for, and how to find, engage and hold on to that audience, has become a genuine competitive advantage, not a nice-to-have.

What have children taught you about films and media that adults working in the industry might sometimes overlook?

Rikke: A lot! A few things stand out.

First, children experience watching films as something profoundly social. At home, it's tied to family bonding, with children often mentioning parents, siblings, pets and weekends when they talk about film. At the cinema, it's about the whole outing: the big screen, the excitement, the shared experience; it's very rarely about the film alone. That's easy for an industry focused on content to lose sight of.

Second, children outgrow content made specifically “for them” much faster than we expect. They often find it too childish and gravitate toward characters older than themselves and stories more complex than the industry sometimes assumes they can handle. Young audiences don't want to be talked down to; they want narratives that match their growing curiosity and maturity.

Third, across the countries we've done research in, we've found far more similarities than differences among young audiences. Age turned out to be a much stronger predictor of what kids enjoy than nationality or gender. We think that's a powerful insight for an industry that often still defaults to producing either very locally or very broadly. There may be more room to speak to European kids as one audience with shared instincts, rather than as fragmented national markets, and Cinekid, bringing together voices from across Europe, feels like exactly the place to build that kind of connection.

The conversation with Rikke and Jesper makes one thing clear: young audiences should not only be consulted once a project is finished. By involving them earlier, creators can develop stories that better reflect their curiosity, maturity and changing cultural lives.

Rikke and Jesper will join Cinekid for Professionals this October. During the Junior Co-Production Market, the PUBLIKUM Audience Awareness Award will once again recognise a project that demonstrates a strong understanding of its intended audience. The winning team will receive €9,000 worth of audience research.

Cinekid for Professionals takes place from 13–15 October 2026 in Amsterdam. Accreditations are open until 25 September.