MIP JUNIOR, MIPCOM& BRAND LICENSING

SPECIAL REPORT

LICENSING & MERCHANDISING

TRENDS

www.tvkids.ws OCTOBER 2012

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Ricardo Seguin GuisePublisher

Anna CarugatiEditor

Mansha DaswaniExecutive Editor

Kristin BrzoznowskiManaging EditorJoanna PadovanoAssociate Editor

Simon WeaverOnline DirectorPhyllis Q. BusellArt Director

Meredith MillerChris Carline

Production DirectorsCesar Suero

Sales & Marketing Director

Terry AcunzoBusiness Affairs Manager

Vanessa BrandSales & Marketing

Manager

Ricardo Seguin GuisePresident

Anna CarugatiExecutive VP &

Group Editorial DirectorMansha Daswani

Associate Publisher &VP of StrategicDevelopment

TV Kids© 2012 WSN INC.

1123 Broadway, #1207New York, NY 10010

Phone: (212) 924-7620

Fax: (212) 924-6940

Website: www.tvkids.ws

IN THIS ISSUEComeback KidsRetailers andlicensees areseeking comfort inevergreen brands 4

InterviewMédia-Participations’ Claude de Saint Vincent 12

Round, yellow and ready for action—PAC-MAN is back and he’s in much more than justa video game. The well-known character is thecenter of a brand-new 26x22-minute 2D and3D animated series, PAC-MAN and the GhostlyAdventures, which is slated to air in the fall of2013 on broadcasters such as Disney XD in theU.S., Sky in the U.K. and Ten in Australia. 41 Entertainment is particularly excited about

the property’s potential in the licensing arena.There’s already a master toy line from Bandai,new video games from NAMCO and a host ofother licensed product, from stationery to back-to-school items to apparel and more, explainsAllen Bohbot, the managing director of 41Entertainment. The company is presentingPAC-MAN at Brand Licensing Europe. “Ourexpectations for Brand Licensing, after the hugeresponse in Las Vegas in June, are very substan-tial,” Bohbot says. “It is the international intro-duction of PAC-MAN.”

41 Entertainmentwww.41e.tv

“PAC-MAN hasbeen around for 32years; he is iconic.”

—Allen Bohbot

PAC-MAN and the Ghostly Adventures

A classic Russian animation, Cat Leopold datesback to the late ’70s. Earlier this year, MondoTV S.p.A. closed an agreement with the TVoperator Russian Mobile Television for the co-production and distribution of a brand-new 2Danimated series surrounding the Cat Leopoldproperty, says Matteo Corradi, Mondo’s seniorVP of international sales. Mondo TVConsumer Products will be exploiting theproperty for licensing and merchandisingworldwide, outside of Russia and the U.S. Other top properties from Mondo are

Gormiti: The New Adventure and Dinofroz. Thecompany wrapped a multi-territory deal withTurner Broadcasting that will bring Gormitiinto more than 130 countries across Europe,the Middle East and Africa. Dinofroz recentlylaunched in Italy on K2, and is also headed toIndia, on the Discovery Kids channel.

Mondo TV S.p.A.www.mondotv.it

Dinofroz

Gormiti: The New Adventure

• PAC-MAN

• Gormiti: The New Adventure • Dinofroz• Cat Leopold

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Brand Licensing Europe (BLE) hasnow firmly established itself as

Europe’s leading marketplace for theconsumer-products business. Everyyear, major names come to London’sOlympia to launch their key newproperties. But BLE 2012 is shapingup to be a bit different: as economicproblems mount, retailers andlicensees are playing it safe with newversions of old favorites.

Indeed, if there is currently onetheme that dominates the Europeanconsumer-products market, it is ahuge streak of caution and conser-vatism among retailers and licensees.This is reflected in the new proper-ties being brought to this year’s BrandLicensing Europe.

Saban Brands will have two oldfavorites “debuting” at Olympia. JuliusJr. takes a look at the popular PaulFrank monkey in his youth. Accordingto Elie Dekel, the president of SabanBrands, the new property “targetsyounger kids than the original Julius.In marketing terms, you would look atthis as a diffusion brand, and in enter-tainment terms you would look at thisas a spin-off. It comes to the marketwith several partners already embed-ded on both the consumer-productand television sides and this is a big ini-tiative for us. It is a new one, and weare going to put a lot of resourcesbehind it and create a lot of excitementaround it.”

TV KIDS4

Retailers and licensees are

seeking the comfort of evergreen

brands as they head into

Brand Licensing Europe.

By Bob Jenkins KidsComeback

41e’s PAC-MAN and the Ghostly Adventures.

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Among the well-known brands returning to theforefront of Saban’s marketing plans is Digimon, whichin the ’90s, Dekel recalls, was “second only to PowerRangers in its scope and success.”

Another cult classic returning to the market isPAC-MAN, which 41 Entertainment is introducingat BLE this year. A new series, PAC-MAN and theGhostly Adventures, already has Disney XD and Skyin the U.K. on board as broadcast partners, andlicensing agents have been appointed across theglobe. Allen Bohbot, the managing director of 41Entertainment, notes that the licensing and merchan-dising strategy for the property includes a master toyline from Bandai, new video games from NAMCOEntertainment, stationery, back-to-school items,

apparel and more. “PAC-MAN has been around for32 years; he is iconic, with a 94-percent recognitionfactor, and is supported by a brand-new high-qualityTV show.”

OLD AND NEWAmerican Greetings Properties (AGP) is bringing anew property to the market: The WotWots, made atNew Zealand’s legendary Weta Workshop. However,the rest of its lineup is solidly made up of oldfavorites. Topping the list is Care Bears, whichGabrielle Oliff, the VP of brands and marketing,describes as “a top priority at BLE. We have recentlyrelaunched the brand with an all-new CGI version,Care Bears: Welcome to Care-a-Lot, and a new toy-product line from Hasbro will hit the shelves in manyEuropean markets during 2013.” Strawberry Shortcake

and Holly Hobbie continue to be evergreen proper-ties for AGP, which recently announced a third seasonfor Strawberry Shortcake’s Berry Bitty Adventures, and,reports Oliff, “Holly Hobbie has flourished in homegoods, back to school and stationery.”

The near-ubiquitous theme of tr ied-and-trueproperties being revived in an appropriate form forthe modern market is continued at Studio 100,whose BLE slate is led by the 3D revival of the ’70sclassic Maya the Bee.

A co-production with ZDF, TF1 and TiJi, the series isa “fun-filled 3D animated adventure TV series for 4-to 6-year-olds focusing on Maya’s adventures in themeadow with her many friends,” says Marie-LaureMarchand, the international licensing director at the

company. Maya certainly has many fr iends in theconsumer-products field, with Marchand reporting thatthe series “already has over 225 licensees in Europe,covering areas such as publishing, toys and games,plush, home entertainment, food and apparel.” Masterlicensees in place include Egmont Kids Media for pub-lishing in Eastern Europe, Lansay for toys in France, andIMC for toys in Latin America, Scandinavia, EasternEurope, Turkey, Israel, Spain, Portugal, Greece, Italy,Belgium and the Netherlands.

Another revival of a ’70s German classic, Vicky theViking, is also a key BLE property for Studio 100.Vicky the Viking “is a trans-generational series,” saysMarchand. “It’s a renowned licensing success inGerman-speaking countr ies and we already havelicensees on board covering all the main productcategories.”

Buzzing brands: Studio 100’s

Maya the Bee isamong the classic

brands back on themarket, with a new CGI series

and licensing and merchandising

extensions.

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6 TV KIDS

Classic Media, which is being rebranded as Dream-Works Animation Classics, describes itself as “a leader inreinventing the entertainment classics of yesterday andcreating the entertainment classics of tomorrow.” So itis no surprise to discover more old favorites reinventedfor the contemporary market spearheading its fall slate.Leading the field is Show Your Stripes!, honoring thisyear’s 25th anniversary of Where’s Waldo?/Where’s Wally?,the original “search and find” property, which has to datesold in excess of 58 million books in more than 38countries and 30 languages around the world. In tencountries it ranks in the top 25 paid apps of all time.

“The iconic traveller will be ‘easy’ to spot this yearas the brand marks its 25th anniversary with a globalcelebration featuring new products and partnershipswith industry leaders across fashion, music andsports,” says Nicole Blake, the executive VP of globalmarketing and consumer products at DreamWorksAnimation Classics.

Postman Pat is another of DreamWorks AnimationClassics’ brands having a big year in 2013. Not only willnext year see the release of the brand’s first-ever the-atrical film, Postman Pat: The Movie, which will have itsworld premiere in the U.K. on May 24, 2013, but thefirst quarter will also bring the launch of season twoof Postman Pat: Special Delivery Service on CBeebies. “Wenow have a Scandinavian release for the movie and dis-tributors have been signed for ten other territories withdates to be announced shortly,” Blake says. “But the

action isn’t all on the screen! We also have 35 licensees,including a new toy range from Character

Options and new publishing from Egmont,and other new products and packaging

in development, as well as the rolloutof a new live tour across the U.K.”

Italy’s Mondo TV has another ’70sclassic revival at Olympia in the formof Cat Leopold. Originated in Russia,the animated property is beingupdated with a new 13x13-minute

show that Mondo TV is co-producingwith Russian Mobile Television. How-

ever, the two giants of Mondo’s BLEoffering are Gormiti and Dinofroz.

TOYS TO TVGormiti: The New Adventure will be 52 half-hour

episodes of full high-def, 3D CGI animation.Delivery will commence in the fall of 2012 and

continue into 2013. Turner Broadcasting has signed asthe broadcaster for 130 countries in Europe, the Mid-dle East and Africa, and the licensing and merchandis-ing rights for all of those territories except Italy, SanMarino, Vatican City and France. Mondo TV Con-sumer Products is taking on the role of subagent inRussia, Eastern Europe, the ex-Yugoslavia, Greece,Spain and Portugal. Based on the pocket-sized col-lectible toys from Giochi Preziosi, Dinofroz has a new

You’ve got mail:Next year is animportant one for DreamWorks Animation Classics’Postman Pat, witha theatrical filmset for release aswell as a secondseason of theCBeebies seriesPostman Pat:Special DeliveryService.

Wish fulfillment: Germany’s m4e has signed up a broadrange of licensees for Mia and Me.

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10 TV KIDS

series of 26 half-hour episodes that will be deliveredthis fall. Both properties are owned by Giochi Preziosi,which co-produced the series with Mondo TV. GiochiPreziosi is also the worldwide master toy licensee.

Rainbow will hit the aisles in Olympia straight fromthe MIPCOM launch of season five of its successfulseries Winx Club. There are now a total of 130 episodesavailable in 2D and 3D for the series, airing in morethan 130 countries worldwide. That success has alsobeen reflected in the Winx consumer-product pro-gram. “Winx Club has 365 licensees worldwide and has

generated, literally, billions of dollars in retail sales,”says Bettina Köckler, Rainbow’s senior VP and gen-eral manager of global consumer products. “Seasonfive launches with a brand-new series of toys, man-ufactured by Witty Toys, which is part of the Rain-bow Group. In North America, Australia, NewZealand and the U.K., JAKKS Pacific is the mastertoy licensee. Winx Club’s main broadcast partners

are RAI in Italy and Nickelodeon for a number ofkey territories, especially our newest market, the

U.S. Hitting our fifth season we do, of course, havevery close ties with leading broadcasters around theworld, who continue to support Winx Club with theirbest time slots.”

OUT OF THE CLOSETAmong the old favorites in new forms on offer at BrandLicensing Europe, Moonscoop is showing up with a newbrand, Chloe’s Closet, which launched in 2010. The seriesis centered on Chloe, an adorable, imaginative little girlwho embarks on fantastical adventures during her dress-up play. “Chloe’s adventures involve the audience andencourage viewers to celebrate how delightful it is to bea little kid, and how exciting it is to explore preschoolmath skills,” says Brigitte Legendre-Benloulou, Moon-scoop’s senior VP of consumer products and marketingfor Western Europe.

Chloe’s Closet is broadcast on KiKA in Germany,France 5, and Cartoonito in the U.K. and Italy. GoldenBear is the master toy licensee.

“It is becoming increasingly difficult to launcha new property as retailers are increasingly

focused on fewer and fewer proven brands,”notes Hans Ulrich Stoef, the CEO of Ger-many’s m4e. Neverless, m4e has a licensingand merchandising hit in Mia and Me.

Since the property’s introduction at BLElast year, it has aired on KiKA in Ger-many and on Nickelodeon in Scandi-navia and Benelux with great success.

In Germany, “Mia and Me went toair in August and has won a 30-percent market share in the 3-

to-13 demo,” Stoef reports.

Power players: The extensive rangeof branded productsfor Saban’s PowerRangers includescostumes for kids.

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TV KIDS 11

“As a result, we already have a large and growingrange of licensees and are looking forward to a verygood year.” Sold to more than 50 markets, Mia andMe has a worldwide toy deal with Mattel—the firstever signed between the toy giant and a Germancompany. A second season is in the works.

ON TARGETStoef believes that one of the reasons Mia and Me has sosuccessfully bucked the trend of sticking with provenproperties is that “it is very tightly focused on the 5-to-9demographic. To succeed today, brands need to be veryclearly focused on a very well-defined demographic.”

Studio 100’s Marchand agrees with Stoef that “with thecurrent economic downturn, licensees and retailers wantto limit risk as much as possible, and so they tend to stickwith properties they know. It is certainly true that, from alicensing perspective, new series currently have a muchmore difficult time launching.”

DreamWorks Animation Classics’ Blake is another who isadamant that “without any question, the market isheavily backing the tried and true. Retailers aredefinitely risk-averse at the moment and are look-ing for properties they know work, and also thosethey know have great appeal across all generations,which plays well into [our] library and ethos.”

Moonscoop’s Legendre-Benloulou has no doubtthat “the market in Europe currently needs tobe reassured, and is not ready to takerisks due to the current difficult eco-nomic situation.”

APG’s Oliff is clear that “the Euro-pean market has been a challenge overthe past year, and we have had to manageexpectations internally. However [onthe plus side], our evergreen brands

such as Care Bears, Holly Hobbie and Strawberry Short-cake are weathering the storm, and consumer demand isallowing us to explore opportunities beyond our corecategories and countries.”

Rainbow’s Köckler, on the other hand, sees thepresent situation differently, insisting, “The marketis constantly changing. It’s not a matter of it beingdifficult, it is a matter of having the right propertyand the right strategy for that property.”

At Mondo TV, Micheline Azoury, the head of inter-national sales and brand manager, agrees. “The real diffi-culty, especially in the kids’ arena, is that they are sounpredictable and fashions change so quickly.”

Whatever your view of the European consumer-products market right now, one thing is for sure. Lookaround the halls of BLE and you’ll see a lot of very famil-iar brands, some from a very long time past.

Nine lives: One ofMondo TV’s

properties for BLE isan updated version

of Cat Leopold.

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Some of Europe’s most cherished animatedcharacters, including Lucky Luke and Tintin(who last year spawned a big-budget 3DCGI film from Steven Spielberg and PeterJackson), call the Média-Participationsgroup home. The French concern has busi-nesses including comics, books and maga-zine publishing, new media, and animation pro-duction and distribution. With Ellips animeProductions, Dargaud Media, Dupuis Audio-visuel and Storimages, Média-Participationshas been delivering a steady supply of ani-mated series, including The GarfieldShow and Chicken Town, to Frenchbroadcasters, while Mediatoon Distributionis taking those shows to channels world-wide. Claude de Saint Vincent, the CEO ofMédia-Participations, tells TV Kids abouthow the group’s various businesses supporteach other to build animated brands withglobal reach.

TV KIDS: What role does the audiovisual business playin the broader Média-Participations group?DE SAINT VINCENT: Right now it represents a lit-tle more than 10 percent of our turnover. We’ve beenslowly increasing that. There are around 20 to 25new animated series produced in France every year.We produce three to five of them, and there is nosense in increasing that. We have five major broad-casters—they’ll never rely only on one partner. Hav-ing reached 15 to 20 percent of the market, you can-not hope to go further. We are trying to increase ourrevenues by selling more abroad and expanding thevisibility of our characters. Increasing the level ofproduction itself would probably be a dead end.

TV KIDS: Have French broadcasters maintained theirinvestments in children’s programming?DE SAINT VINCENT: They have legal obligations,which maintain the number of hours produced. Butall their market shares have decreased tremendously.Twenty years ago there were only a few major broad-casters. In the youth market, we’ve gone from threepowerful broadcasters to 20 weaker ones. This has twoopposite consequences. All properties still have valuebecause there is a need for content—there are so manyscreens. But the average price to buy those shows has

been reduced. So the catalogue has real value, there isstill a shelf life for most of these shows, but the turnoverper sale is decreasing.

TV KIDS:You own a number of animation produc-tion companies. What are the benefits of operatingthese outfits as separate, distinct brands?DE SAINT VINCENT: Our producers have specificidentities. Ellipsanime, our leading producer, is produc-ing original series or series based on characters fromabroad or from other publishers. Dargaud Media andDupuis Audiovisuel are only working on adaptationsfrom our publishing properties. Storimages is only pro-ducing for younger audiences. Each of them has builta specialty that gives them credibility with producers.That’s important for us to be able to answer our broad-casters’ needs.

TV KIDS: Are there opportunities for your variouscompanies, animation and publishing, to share resourcesor know-how?DE SAINT VINCENT: Whatever content you areproducing, be it magazines, books, video games,tele vision shows, you have to ensure they travel indifferent media. Most of our major graphic novels orcomic characters have been able to travel into ani-

TV KIDS12

By Mansha Daswani

Média-Participations’

Claude de Saint Vincent

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mation, some of them have been adapted into videogames, others will be used in merchandising, and afew will generate magazines. For instance, Yakari,which was produced by Storimages, has become astar in Germany—it aired on KiKA—and now hasa magazine. It was born in a graphic novel inFrench. It became a star in Germany on the screen,which led to the creation of a magazine [in Ger-many]. And then we started to produce the graphicnovels in German. It’s important for us to have thisability to explore different media. We are probablythe only multimedia group with press activities,magazine activities, book publishing, animation pro-duction—television and cinema—video games andDVDs. In a perfect world, all our properties wouldbe found in all those platforms.

TV KIDS: When we spoke in2008, you said that facing theInternet challenge was one of yourmain priorities. Since then, howhave you embraced all the newplatforms available today?DE SAINT VINCENT: If it was oneof our priorities four years ago, ithas become the priority now.We’ve been very active, in allour fields of activity. Mostof our books are nowavailable online and ontablets. In France, the markethas been a little slow to start, and late,compared to the U.S. market or theAsian one. Amazon Kindle waslaunched in the States in 2007and on Amazon.com there are1 million books available indigital format. In France,the Kindle was onlylaunched in October2011 and there are 65,000books available in digital formaton Amazon.fr. It’s because of theauthors’ rights system in France.It’s highly complicated to dothe paperwork to get thoserights back and exploit them.It will take time beforethe digital market is asimportant in France as itis in the States.

The other problem we have forour kind of content—graphicnovels, children’s books, anima-tion shows—is that there isonly one major platform suit-able, which is the iPad, [priced]at €600 in France. We’restill waiting for a mass-market tablet to come inand generate consumers forVOD and book reading ontablets. We are waiting forMicrosoft to launch its tablet,we’re waiting for theKindle Fire, we arewaiting for Google andKobo to launch theirtablets… there’s a lot to come.This year we should reachalmost $1 million revenuesfrom VOD with our anima-tion programs.

Cool cat: DargaudMedia produces thecomic-book-basedCGI animated seriesThe Garfield Show,which Mediatoonhas sold into numerous territories,including the U.S.and China.

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