PinkFong and Baby Shark’s Space Adventure December 20, 2019 bizadmin Pinkfong is the children’s educational brand of SmartStudy, a South Korean educational entertainment company. Pinkfong consists of mainly children’s songs, of which the most famous is “Baby Shark”, with more than four billion views on YouTube. Their educational channel has more than 20 million subscribers, with brightly-colored programming of stories, sing-along songs, and dances represented by a pink fox named “Pinkfong”. The global product development company has more than 4,000 children’s videos, songs, games, and apps. Formation Pinkfong was formed with the inception of SmartStudy at their Seoul headquarters, in June 2010. A Los Angeles branch with a few employees opened in 2016, and another is located in Shanghai. The U.S. branch’s CEO Bin Jeong said the name was created from the pink fox character, and the fun sound of “fong” that sounded similar to “phone”. The focus is on children ages one to five years old. By 2015, the company had released 520 mobile apps with central base apps like “Pinkfong Nursery Rhymes”. SmartStudy’s CFO and co-founder Lee Ryan Seung-kyu said typical nursery rhymes were usually “slow and calm” so they began with a small project, searching for a more upbeat song “for the new generation” that would appeal globally. The “Pinkfong! Kids’ Songs & Stories” YouTube channel was launched on December 13, 2011, with the brand character, a pink or magenta-colored animated cartoon fox, a Prince from the planet Staria, that was inspired by the fox in the classic French book The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. Comparisons to other animations Pinkfong joined another “beloved” anthropomorphic character named Pororo, a longtime children’s favorite in South Korea, in the preschool education market. Both characters became recognizable worldwide and like Pororo, children and parents began associating the pink fox with children’s education. In May 2017, journalist Kim Young-joo of the newspaper JoongAng Ilbo wrote that Pinkfong, a pink desert fox character that combines a fox and a phone, is “emerging as the second Pororo”, with housewives with young children calling him “President Pinkfong”.[9] CEO Lee said that Pinkfong might be described “somewhere between Disney and Sesame Street”. An August 2018, a comparison of YouTube channel subscribers showed the established brand, Sesame Street, had 3.9 million subscribers and Pinkfong had 10 million.
