Mediawan has partnered with Chinese electric vehicle manufacturer BYD to fund and develop new content, starting with a product-placement deal in the upcoming Miraculous feature film. 

Beyond BYD vehicles appearing in Mediawan projects, the companies are also planning to develop new content together inspired by the car brand, starting with a special episode of the Miraculous Chibi series that will be released on YouTube. 

Product placement in kids movies is a pretty rare occurrence, and even more so in kids TV series—toy-based shows excepted, of course. But given the current realities of the market, producers are looking further afield for new kinds of partnerships and investment opportunities that can help them get projects off the ground as their more traditional funding sources have dried up. 

For Mediawan, it’s “becoming essential” to include brands as partners in a production, since it helps the company invest more and scale up its projects, said group chairman and co-founder Pierre-Antoine Capton in a release. 

Over the last year, Mediawan Kids & Family has been busy diversifying its business models and mining fresh sources of content, including signing a deal to turn NFT brand Claynosaurz into a series, and building a slate that’s 50% derived from digital-first creators. 

The automotive industry is a deep-pocketed sector with a long-seeded interest in reaching families through content by way of product placement deals and in-car entertainment systems—and some big brands aren’t shying away from going for a ride with car-makers. 

This type of deal isn’t totally new territory for Mediawan Kids & Family, which previously had a similar partnership with Volkswagen. The companies teamed up in 2023 to feature multiple electric Volkswagen vehicles in Miraculous: Ladybug & Cat Noir – The Movie. And that same year, they extended their collaboration beyond the screen with Playmates Toys and ZAG rolling out a toy figure based on Ladybug’s Volkswagen car.  

Volkswagen has been very driven about getting its products into kids films. It recently signed a deal with Walt Disney Animation to put three vehicles into Zooptopia 2, and Disney created a 30-second ad spot for TV, theaters and social media showing off these animated cars. 

But BYD EVP Stella Lit says the Mediawan deal “marks a new chapter” for the 23-year-old car company, which just announced last week that it sold two million electric vehicles in 2025, beating Tesla to become the world’s largest electric vehicle manufacturer.