Axios’ Sara Fischer in conversation with Candle Media’s Kevin Mayer
📅 Jun 18, 2025Axios10 MIN202 VIEWS15 SEGMENTS · 2 SPEAKERS
Axios media correspondent Sara Fischer speaks to Candle Media co-founder and co-CEO Kevin Mayer about staying true to authentic brand content, his future plans and building trust at an Axios Live event at Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity.
Thank you. All right, everybody. If you don't mind quieting down, we're gonna get this conversation started. I am joined by Kevin Mayer, who is a household name in Hollywood and in the media industry. Kevin was a longtime Disney executive. He started his own company called Candle Media. And you might not have heard of Candle — probably heard if you're here — but you definitely know what Candle owns, because either you or your kids or your friends use Candle brands and products. Kevin, thank you so much for being with us.
Of course. Give everyone just the quick 30 seconds from your own POV. The brands that you own — I just said everyone probably knows them. Give everyone a quick rundown.
Well, the brands that if you're a parent of young kids, you know — Cocomelon, Blippi, Little Angel — a lot of the most popular kids' IP on the internet and now on streaming, too. It's a company that was founded with taking YouTube IP, making it great, making it the most popular it can be with various techniques, and then multiplatforming it. So if you look, if you're a Cocomelon fan, for instance, it has 200 million, plus or minus, subscribers on YouTube right now. Just in English language, it was the number one show on Netflix. What we did is we took these little three- to seven-minute programs, put them into one-hour compilations, licensed it to Netflix, and from 2021 to today, it was the most watched show on Netflix around the world. And the second most watched show, I think, was NCIS and then Grey's Anatomy. It was — it's a huge hit. So it's been — it has a huge amount of reach. It's, I think, very enriching content and a really nice thing to be looking after and stewarding. And then we have Hello Sunshine also, which is Reese Witherspoon's company. You've probably seen many of the shows that we produce. They're broadly distributed on Netflix and Amazon and elsewhere and Apple TV. So those are the two big brands that we have in Candle.
We're here to talk about trusted content. One of the challenges when you have a brand that has such a loyal following on one platform is ensuring that you can create authenticity and stay true to the brand when you bring it to other places. How were you able to do that in taking a YouTube show, putting it on Netflix, and not losing what it was originally all about?
Well, that was quite easy because we just took the same programs. They were literally the same programs that are on for free on YouTube, repackaged in a very simple way. There's no through line between stories; they're just independent stories that we had on YouTube, and just made one, you know, three hours a season. Every season we produce about three hours of content. There were three one-hour episodes. They were exactly what we have on YouTube, and it just works really, really well.
Fischer, S. (2025, June 18). Axios’ Sara Fischer in conversation with Candle Media’s Kevin Mayer [Interview transcript]. Axios. CEOInterviews.AI. https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/3075570/
MLA
Sara Fischer. "Axios’ Sara Fischer in conversation with Candle Media’s Kevin Mayer." Axios, 18 Jun. 2025. Transcript, CEOInterviews.AI, https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/3075570/.
BibTeX
@misc{fischer2025_3075570,
author = {Sara Fischer},
title = {Axios’ Sara Fischer in conversation with Candle Media’s Kevin Mayer},
howpublished = {Interview transcript, Axios. CEOInterviews.AI},
year = {2025},
month = {jun},
url = {https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/3075570/},
note = {Speaker-attributed transcript with timestamps}
}
