Until videos of tween girls flooding Sephora and Ulta Beauty in search of expensive skincare products set off debates across social media earlier this year, most marketers weren’t actively considering the role of Gen Alpha—the age cohort born from 2010 to 2024—in their marketing strategies. 

But Julia Moonves, senior VP of advertising sales & brand partnerships at kids and family media studio pocket.watch, has been paving the way for brands to connect with Gen Alpha (and their largely millennial parents) for years. Since joining pocket.watch in 2018, Moonves has built the digital content studio’s brand partnerships and ad sales from the ground up and expanded the company far beyond its initial handful of “kidfluencer” partnerships.

Moonves has worked closely with social platforms, creators, advertisers and legal experts to develop pocket.watch’s media business, which now links major brands including Nintendo, Paramount, Lego and Netflix to Gen Alpha audiences through COPPA-compliant paid media, gaming and metaverse integrations, connected TV spots and partnerships with Gen Alpha influencers such as Ryan Kaji of “Ryan’s World.”

In 2023, Moonves brokered a yearlong brand deal between Kaji and Nintendo that generated over 5 million views for Nintendo franchises such as “Super Mario” and “Kirby”—a partnership Nintendo quickly renewed for 2024. She also struck an advertising partnership with Mattel that granted pocket.watch exclusive control over the ads that appear on YouTube channels for more than 80 Mattel properties, such as Barbie, Hot Wheels and Thomas & Friends. And pocket.watch is one of very few companies, alongside Disney and Nickelodeon, granted access to ad inventory on the YouTube Kids platform. 

Through these combined efforts, Moonves increased pocket.watch’s media sales by over 50% between 2022 and 2023 and tripled the revenue the company pulled in from its YouTube Kids ad inventory sales. She’s set to continue innovating in the Gen Alpha marketing sphere over the next several months ahead of the theatrical release of Kaji’s first film, “Ryan’s World the Movie: Titan Universe Adventure.”

What advice would you give to your younger self?

Lean into how abnormally competitive you are. It’s an asset.  

What’s the biggest risk you’ve ever taken?

Leaving my job at a popular YouTube network that had just been acquired by Disney to move to New York (3,000 miles away) and start a new business. 

If you weren’t doing your current job, what would you be doing and why?

Driving revenue in women’s sports. Everything going on in that category right now is super exciting. It’s an undervalued environment with drastically undervalued players, franchises and fandoms. There are huge deals to be done around broadcast, sponsorship, licensing and equity. 

What should the industry do to encourage more women and people of color into its ranks?

Pay them as much as the old white guys. 

How will AI impact your job in the future?

AI will impact the mundane and early steps in the creative process: thought starters, contextual content suggestions, updating media plans, etc. Anything that a human can do or has to do repeatedly, AI will be able to do. But creative deal-making will be a hard skill to replace.