Elie Dekel

This interview originally appeared in the MIPTV 2014 issue of TV Kids.

One of the longest-running kids’ franchises in TV history, Saban Brands’ Power Rangers is in its 21st season and remains one of the top-rated boys’ live-action series on air today. The company has continued to refresh the brand and now the newest iteration, Power Rangers Dino Charge, is being prepped for 2015. Saban Brands has also reinvigorated its hit Digimon franchise with the new Digimon Fusion series, and is catering to the younger set with the Paul Frank offshoot Julius Jr. Continuing its commitment to delivering high-quality entertainment experiences, Saban Brands has teamed up with the renowned Cirque du Soleil group for a cross-platform kids’ property. Elie Dekel, the president of Saban Brands, talks with TV Kids about the importance of working with brands that create lasting connections with passionate fans.  

TV KIDS: How have you continued to refresh the Power Rangers brand?
DEKEL: Power Rangers continues to be a global franchise. We are now in our 21st season of the show, with continuous broadcast, continuous production. I believe there’s a very short list of kids’ shows that can say that.

In the U.S., we’ve launched our newest season, which is Power Rangers Super Megaforce. Super Megaforce is interesting for us because during the course of this season, our Rangers get the ability to morph into any number of Rangers from over the past 20 years. They get to draw on their powers and their fancy costumes, and it makes for a really interesting story line throughout the season. Something unique about Power Rangers is that every year, we refresh the show with a new theme and a new cast. Since we rebooted the show three years ago, we are on a biannual cycle. So every two years we make a dramatic shift, but add a bit of an upgrade in that mid-year cycle. We’ve gone from Power Rangers Megaforce to Super Megaforce, and we’re very pleased to announce that next year’s season will be called Power Rangers Dino Charge.

Power Rangers Dino Charge draws on the power of dinosaurs, which is always a big hit with kids, and is a similar theme to what Mighty Morphin Power Rangers was all about 21 years ago. Now, we are bringing back some of that DNA of the original Mighty Morphin show, and that will be a very exciting season for 2015.

TV KIDS: The Digimon franchise has also evolved over the years.
DEKEL: Digimon Fusion is another show that we have brought back. It’s a series that was very successful in the late ’90s, and which has enjoyed numerous iterations over time, Digimon Fusion being the most current. It is airing on Nickelodeon in the U.S. and has global distribution with strong broadcast partners around the world, including ITV in the U.K.

Digimon is a really interesting show because when it first premiered as an animated series back in the late ’90s—Digimon is short for “digital monsters”—kids didn’t know what we were talking about with the whole idea of digital. Today, kids are really leading the curve in how digital impacts our lives, how they engage with properties digitally and how they watch content through digital channels. We feel that Digimon Fusion brings those same aspects of story and character that we enjoyed in the ’90s, but is now much more relevant to kids, who really are embracing all [forms] of digital entertainment in ways that we could not have imagined 15 years ago. 

Digimon has tremendous potential for extension into all aspects of online engagement, on-demand viewing and certainly games and apps of all types, which are in the pipeline and coming to market now.

TV KIDS: How has the rollout been for Julius Jr.?
DEKEL: One of our treasured brands at Saban Brands is Paul Frank. It’s a fashion and lifestyle brand that emerged out of southern California art and design culture. It is now a global phenomenon in its reach and appeal. Our mascot for the brand, Julius the Monkey, is widely recognized around the world, and particularly across Southeast Asia it has become a phenomenal success. We have taken that non-content brand and have begun to expand on it. Julius Jr. is the first content extension of Paul Frank. With that, we have taken our monkey Julius and aged him backward to his toddler self and have built a whole world around him and his friends.

Julius Jr. is an animated preschool series on the air now globally with the best-in-class partners. We’re very pleased to have Fisher-Price on board as our global toy partner. The series is on Nickelodeon in the U.S. and is performing exceptionally well, and we will be seeing more seasons going forward and a rather robust consumer-products line that will extend throughout the rest of this year and into next.

TV KIDS: How did the partnership with Cirque du Soleil come about?
DEKEL: At Saban Brands we are always looking to expand our portfolio and thinking about how we can extend brands into content. In the case of Cirque du Soleil, we saw a really unique opportunity to collaborate with a partner who has a brand unlike any other—one of live entertainment, imagination, creativity, incredible human feats that make you drop your jaw and have a truly immersive experience. It is recognized around the world. We saw this as a remarkable opportunity, and [there is] a remarkable amount of creative content to work with.

Cirque du Soleil Média and Saban Brands are working together to take the creative DNA of Cirque to build a new kids’ property. This is a series that will bring all the creativity, art, music, design and magic of Cirque du Soleil in a format that is very accessible and engaging for children. We also know that mom and dad recognize the brand and have certain expectations of Cirque du Soleil, so we’re working very closely with the team at Cirque du Soleil, who are exceptionally collaborative, to bring that authentic experience into a kids’ format. We could not be more thrilled to work on such an amazing property, and we look forward to revealing more in the coming months.

TV KIDS: What are the plans for continuing to expand the global business?
DEKEL: The global business has always been a hallmark of Saban, with Saban Entertainment, Saban Capital Group and, more recently, Saban Brands. Haim Saban [the chairman and CEO of Saban Capital Group] has always had a global view toward his business, and we have worked diligently to take our activities and extend them globally.

As part of that effort with Saban Brands, we recently opened a London office, which is charged with helping us manage various partners across the European continent. It enables us to be much more connected to our partners, whether they be broadcast, manufacturing, retail and sometimes production. [We want] to have a more local presence, more local insights and more information about trends and viewer behavior. We now have four people in London, and we look forward to announcing more international offices in the coming months.

TV KIDS: How is Saban Brands’ consumer-products business?
DEKEL: The core of our business philosophy is the notion that brands matter. They matter more now than ever before in a world of increased competition, and competition not just for airtime or shelf space but for sharing viewers’ and consumers’ minds. When we think about bringing new projects to the market, we think about projects that have the potential to be multidimensional. We refer to it as omni-channel—not just channels in the form of TV channels, but channels in the form of how we reach our consumer. So we consider not just television or home entertainment, but the on-demand space, the interactive space, physical products and live experiences, social media and how we engage in a relationship with our viewers and our fans. We have really built our company around this philosophy of bringing a branded piece of content to a viewer—ideally a passionate fan—and then extending it through all of these various channels.

Our consumer-products business in particular is supported by that strategy. We have been very careful with each one of our properties to make sure that the entire ecosystem around the property is integrated and coordinated on a strategy, content and merchandising level. We work very holistically with our partners in every step of that chain to ensure that we are expressing the brand appropriately and that we’re delivering on the promise of what the fan ultimately wants to experience. Consumer products are very much an integrated part of our business. We find that the consumer-products business and all the various extensions are actually additive to the viewing experience, and as such they provide a much richer, deeper opportunity for a viewer to engage with and enjoy the shows that we bring to them.

Part of our strategy is working with properties that elicit a very strong, passionate response. It’s so important in this competitive marketplace to have that connection with the audience. We work really hard at identifying and developing properties that support that connection, and then we really invest time, effort and now technology into building those relationships. Those relationships matter.