Magic Light Pictures’ Alex Sanson talks switching licensee workshops to Zoom and online retailers having a ‘second Christmas’.
From switching licensee presentations and workshops to Zoom, through to creating special content featuring their characters to help parents suddenly needing to home-school as well as work, licensors and IP owners have stepped up during the crisis.
Today, Source chats to Alex Sanson, marketing executive at Magic Light Pictures, about how the company took a different approach with its biannual licensee workshop, how the strength of The Gruffalo has stood it in good stead and the categories enjoying healthy sales.
“One of the biggest changes has been for our marketing function. Within a few short days the majority of our marketing activations for the year were being postponed indefinitely, that meant we had to refocus our attention online. We quickly set up a new strategy to keep our fans engaged online and this strategy has been responsible for increasing our following by 30% so far. We created lots of new activities to keep children occupied at home and help parents.
We recently held our biannual licensee workshop via Zoom. We had to approach the event in an entirely different way, and decided to divide our licensees into four groups and run the session several times over a day. This gave each licensee greater opportunity to talk and gave us the space to hear and respond to each of them – recognising their successes and their concerns, especially in light of recent events. We certainly have the impression that The Gruffalo is a trusted and reliable brand which gives retailers the confidence to stock our products going forward.
Despite the pandemic many of our licensees remain positive, indeed the strength of the brand has set us in good stead and we have signed a handful of new licences in the UK, a number of renewals and a total of six new licences in Italy.
The initial shock of COVID-19 and lockdown brought a lot of non-essential purchasing to a standstill. However, many of our licensees reported that good sales resumed after the first couple of weeks. This was especially the case for toys and games, and eventually loungewear too. Indeed, during our recent licensee workshop a number of partners mentioned online retailers having their ‘second Christmas’.”
This feature originally appeared in the summer 2020 edition of Licensing Source Book. To read the full publication, click on this link.
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