Isaac Newton spoke of standing on the shoulders of giants. Morgan Selzer has stood on the shoulders of Big Bird.
As Chief Content Officer at Headspace, Morgan led a partnership that allowed Headspace to break into the highly-competitive world of family content.
But they didn’t go in alone. An unexpected partnership with Sesame Street allowed them to see—and be seen by—a wildly larger audience than they could have reached on their own. It also allowed Headspace to meet parents, kids, and caregivers where they were already consuming content, directly on Sesame Street’s channels.
At the same time, traditional paid marketing is becoming a less sure bet. “Paid and performance marketing are less efficient than they used to be, because there’s just so much out there,” says Morgan.
So the question becomes: How can you show up in buzzy, unexpected ways that spark real conversation? In partnerships with Sesame Street, Morgan managed to create just that: buzz. (As in, Zzzzzzz’s. You’ll see what we mean below.)
Key takeaways:
Headspace turned a small, one-time audio collaboration with Sesame Street into a full multimedia franchise—6 animated shorts, a 6-book Penguin Random House deal, and the Goodnight, World! podcast—by pitching a bigger vision than the original brief. Morgan Selzer's framework for a high-impact content partnership has five parts: partners (shared values + complementary reach), scope (right-size to serve the audience, not just what's easiest to produce), audience (prioritize real value over self-promotion), distribution (publish where the audience already is, even if that's the partner's channel, not yours), and what's next (let performance data guide future content). Choosing partners with existing audience trust (not just complementary products) lets smaller brands borrow credibility instead of building it from scratch. Results: 45M video views (~45x Headspace's typical performance), 175M media impressions, 6M+ podcast downloads, and an Emmy nomination, all from a project that started as one audio piece. The challenge: Competing for attention as a smaller brand If you’re a smaller operation going up against household names, it’s an uphill battle to make your voice heard.
Like trying to out-shout an opera singer. Or a Mountain Dew-fueled toddler with a megaphone.
Not only do the incumbents have deeper pockets, but they’ve also built the established distribution networks to reach their audience.
How could a meditation app compete for attention against Disney, Nickelodeon, and an infinite number of YouTube videos? (“Budget” was definitely not going to be the answer here.)
Family entertainment was a massive, difficult-to-penetrate market—so Headspace called in the hard-hitters. Like Cookie Monster.
From one-time project to multi-format partnership When Morgan joined Headspace, it was not the category-leading app we know it to be today. The app was still in a fierce battle with other meditation apps and media brands to become the winner in the space—and as part of that, was seeking to reach new audiences through new marketing methods, in order to be the first to bring meditation to the masses.
It was time to get creative with how they reached consumers. A strategic mandate to “make the brand famous” led to a push to break into children and family mindfulness content. One such project was supposed to be a one-time, audio-only project with Sesame Street.
But she quickly realized this thing had the potential to go much further.
She recalls: "I went to Sesame Street and told them, 'Hey, I think we have a real opportunity to make this a lot more robust than what the original plans were. Why don't we make these into a series of animated digital shorts?'"
Together, they were able to work in service of the shared goals: help parents and children connect with each other and develop healthy emotional regulation skills together.
Put it this way: 1 "small audio project" became the foundation for Headspace's entire family vertical. That's the power of thinking beyond the brief.
On the surface, content partnerships sound simple, but there's more complexity than meets the eye. Morgan shares her framework for approaching a partnership that delivers outsized results.
How to get the most out of a content partnership Morgan's brand partnership strategy breaks down into five parts.
Partners: Same values, complementary assets The first step of making the most of a partnership is…well, choosing the right partners.
“Sesame Workshop is an incredible nonprofit organization that really aligned with Headspace’s values,” says Morgan. “They are an incredible, trusted resource for parents.”
When you partner with companies that have already built that audience trust, you eliminate the need to build credibility from scratch.
Looking at Sesame Street, Morgan saw three major green flags:
Mission alignment (education + wellness) Audience trust (Sesame Street was a go-to resource for parents) Character recognition (for universal kid appeal) To help you find partners for your business, here’s an evaluation exercise that’ll give you a prioritized list of possible businesses you can begin to design co-marketing briefs around:
⚒️ Partnership evaluation tool
How can you find the right partners for you? Download our process doc for identifying and evaluating potential partnerships, including an LLM prompt to copy-paste for partner ideation and our scorecard for force ranking potential opportunities.
Scope: Natural expansion in service of your audience Once you’ve found the right partner, it’s time to right-size.
Don’t let your original scope stop you from fulfilling a larger vision. Identify the formats and assets that will best serve your shared audience (not just what’s easiest to produce), and pitch what you find meaningful.
“Originally, the idea was to just do audio work with Sesame,” Morgan explains. “But as a parent myself, I knew that to resonate with kids, something visual would be even better.”
She transformed her simple audio project into six animated shorts, each with a unique storyline—like Cookie Monster waiting for his cookies to bake—and Headspace’s signature social-emotional learning techniques embedded right in.
In partnerships, it pays to pitch the bigger vision. Partners often don’t know what’s possible, and you can bring something unique to the table—your expertise plus their reach can create content neither of you could make alone.
Audience: Building for your shared audience With your scope established, it’s time to get down to actually producing the content.
Content partnerships are most impactful when they prioritize delivering real value to audiences, rather than self-promotion.
For Headspace and Sesame, that meant creating memorable videos that matched beloved characters to daily problems.
When Elmo has trouble falling asleep, Headspace’s “Andy” character (voiced by real-life co-founder, Andy Puddicombe) walks him through an exercise. When Cookie Monster is impatiently waiting for cookies to bake, Andy leads him through a sensory meditation exercise. And when Grover has trouble focusing, Andy teaches him a rhyme to take it one thing at a time.
Distribution is an area where partnerships can have incredible impact, especially in channels where their reach and credibility exceeds your own. /ima
“Sesame Street asked me, ‘Do you want it on your channel or ours?’” says Morgan. “And I said, ‘Obviously I want it on yours! The Sesame Street YouTube page is where kids and families are already going.’”
Sesame Street’s relationships helped expand reach even further, bringing the campaign to YouTube Kids’ homepage and the PTA’s email lists.
The matrix plots each channel (yours and your partner's) on two axes: audience fit (how well-suited the channel is to your shared audience) and traction (how much traffic or engagement it already gets).
In Headspace's case, their own LinkedIn scored high traction but lower audience fit, landing it in "growth opportunity"—worth nurturing, but not the main event. Sesame Street's PTA newsletter scored high on both axes, making it an "invest more" channel; meanwhile, the partner's YouTube channel showed high audience fit but comparatively low traction at the time, landing it in "wasted effort" until distribution caught up.
The takeaway: don't default to the channel with the biggest following. Plot both your own and your partner's channels on fit and traction, then prioritize the ones that land in "invest more." That's where Sesame Street's YouTube page, PTA email lists, and YouTube Kids placement ultimately delivered the outsized results for Headspace.
What’s next: Follow the data Once your campaign is up and running, use the results to inform your next move.
When the Elmo bedtime meditation became the #2 most-watched video on Sesame Street’s channel that year, it inspired future content for Headspace.
“We noticed that the Elmo wind down video outperformed the others, which gave us this idea to do more content around the concept of bedtime,” says Morgan.
Realizing parents were in need of bedtime help, Headspace created the Goodnight, World! Series: a children’s podcast to help kids wind down and fall asleep.
The results were 6M+ downloads and a 400% completion rate (meaning people were not only listening, but re-listening).
Bottom line: Your best content tells you what to make next.
From small audio project to media phenomenon Partnering with Sesame Street allowed Headspace to break through an incredibly saturated market—and bring valuable content to improve the lives of their shared audience.
Over time, Morgan’s simple audio project spun out into:
A 6-part animated video series A 6-book deal with Penguin Random House The Goodnight, World! podcast The results by the numbers:
45M video views (~45X more than Headspace’s typical performance) 20M+ views on the Elmo bedtime video 175M media impressions 6M+ Goodnight, World! downloads And an Emmy nomination for children’s content.
Working with Sesame Street helped Headspace get Super Bowl level results with rookie-level budgets. It also helped establish them as a legitimate player in the family-friendly content space, propelling them into new partnerships with the likes of Penguin Random House and Spotify.
FAQs What makes a content partnership successful? Morgan Selzer's framework centers on five things: choosing partners with shared values and complementary reach, scoping the project around what best serves the shared audience, prioritizing real value over self-promotion, distributing where the audience already spends time, and using performance data to guide what comes next.
Should partnership content live on my channel or my partner's? Distribute where your shared audience already is, even if that means publishing primarily on the partner's channel. In this brand collaboration example, Headspace chose to run its content on Sesame Street's YouTube page specifically because that's where families were already watching.
How do I find the right brand partner? Look for companies with values aligned to yours and an audience that already trusts them. Morgan evaluated Sesame Street on three criteria: mission alignment, audience trust, and character recognition. That existing trust means you don't have to build credibility from scratch.
Can a small partnership project turn into something bigger? Yes. Headspace's collaboration with Sesame Street began as a single audio-only project, but pitching a more ambitious vision (animated shorts instead of just audio) turned it into a full franchise, including a book deal and podcast.
