ZAG’s Jeremy Zag discusses global success for Miraculous, starting work on new projects and building the ZAG Play Toy Division.
LicensingSource.net takes a temperature check on the global licensing industry, asking licensors and agents based outside the UK to share their highs and lows of 2022, their strategies for a successful 2023, plus the words they’d use to describe business in the year just gone and the new one.
Today, we head to France/US, with Jeremy Zag, founder and ceo, ZAG.
“Top line, we’ve seen growth in all countries around the world for Miraculous consumer products, and we have had an enthusiastic reception for our latest series, Ghostforce. We activated a number of major cross-promotions for Miraculous, including a multi-territory in-store promotion with Ferrero across its Kinder Surprise eggs, and a McDonalds Happy Meal programme that spanned over 6,000 stores.
Last summer, we launched our Miraculous live show in Argentina, and in autumn, the show premiered in over 29 cities in France. And we already have our dates in June for São Paulo, Brazil.
Ghostforce earned spectacular ratings upon launch, and that is translating into demand for consumer products. Key new partners include Playmates for toys; Rubies for costumes; Blue Ocean for magazines and sticker albums; Panini for books; and Edel for audiobooks and DVDs.
On the content side, we started pre-production on our animated feature Melody (starring the voice talent of Katy Perry); signed a 10-movie deal with Cross Creek Pictures, and announced our newest animated series, Fairyon, a re-imagining of classic fairy tales – with a twist. We’ll be growing our consumer products and marketing teams to support our movie productions. Many of these will be experienced local executives as we continue our strategy to handle our licensing and merchandising activities directly, which has been very successful for us.
We’re also building up our recently announced ZAG Play Toy Division, and continuing to grow our e-commerce department, hiring multiple executives including some from Amazon.
I’d sum up 2022 as spot-on, and I’d like two words for 2023: stronger together.”
This feature originally appeared in the spring 2023 edition of Licensing Source Book. To read the full publication, click on this link.
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