CMC 2014 -The IP Crowd

In today’s highly crowded market place for kids IP, consumers, platforms owners and retailers are becoming more and more brand orientated. Platform owners are increasingly pursuing a ‘fewer bigger better’ approach in an attempt to stand out. While for the consumer there is simply too much choice. Brands, rightly or wrongly, represent either a safer bet or an easy-lazy choice as to what to spend their money on. The retailer’s position is not too dissimilar, with brands representing security, a proven proposition with an established commercial track record.

Children Television and Children’s Publishing still represent two of the main creators of new children’s brands. Historically they have always been strongly connected businesses but primarily on an arm’s length basis with, in simplistic terms, Television optioning and developing book properties and Publishing creating licensed publishing based on TV series. While this model will always remain, this session will explore whether the future of these two businesses, driven by necessity in an already overcrowded market, is one of much greater convergence both creatively and commercially. It will explore the present and future challenges of launching and establishing new IP and what the panellists see as the advantages and disadvantages of the media within which they work. Lastly the session will explore to what extent the individual cultures, as well as the creative and commercial skillsets, of the two industries are compatible.