Hasbro’s Stephen Davis

PREMIUM: Stephen Davis, Hasbro’s executive VP and chief content officer, tells TV Kids how the company is creating multiple touchpoints for kids and families around properties like Transformers and My Little Pony.

As it has evolved from just a toy manufacturer to a company dedicated to “creating the world’s best play experiences,” Hasbro has instituted a brand blueprint for each of its franchises. Centered on storytelling and consumer insights, the brand blueprints have allowed the company to reinvigorate long-running franchises and create new ones that extend from toys and games to consumer products and entertainment experiences.

TV KIDS: What have been some of the significant strategy shifts at Hasbro Studios over the last year or so?
DAVIS: We announced a deal with Paramount Pictures to produce and distribute content based on our brands. We’ve been very focused on moving that new relationship forward. We’re going to collaborate with Paramount on live-action and animated films and television. It’s a phenomenal opportunity for us to control more of our strategy and more specifically, to produce content around our brands that is consistent with our brand blueprint and brand priorities. It gives us the ability to calendarize the release dates of our movies in partnership with Paramount. And we have a very active voice at the table with Paramount on how our movies are marketed. Being able to communicate with our retail partners, sometimes two or three years in advance, is super important to creating the kind of environment where we can activate our brand blueprint across all aspects of our business.

We also, in the spirit of our ongoing commitment to building our entertainment and storytelling capabilities, recently brought on Greg Mooradian, who ran Fox 2000, as president of Allspark Pictures. He’s responsible now for activating and driving our strategy in live-action film and television.

And then Meghan McCarthy has expanded her role substantially—we elevated her to [senior VP of] Allspark Animation, which is our label for animated film and television and digital content. She has been with me at the studio for almost nine years—I hired Meghan originally as one of the writers on the first episode of the My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic animated series. She has been such an amazing influence on the studio.

We had the release of Transformers: The Last Knight. We were very pleased with the performance, particularly at retail. Transformers is growing substantially, driven by storytelling across multiple platforms. The great thing about Transformers is we have touchpoints in the broadest demographic. In preschool we have the Transformers Rescue Bots television series. Transformers Cyberverse is our tween/teen show. There’s fan-based content on Machinima, and then, of course, our four-quadrant movies. That’s paying dividends for us. We are now getting ready for the next Transformers film at the end of this year with Bumblebee, which stars Hailee Steinfeld and John Cena. And we had our first My Little Pony animated feature film, My Little Pony: The Movie, which has also performed incredibly well for the brand. That’s just a few things!

TV KIDS: How did Hanazuki come about and how have you positioned it in the marketplace?
DAVIS: Hanazuki is the company’s first story-driven lifestyle brand. It’s one of the first times where we’ve incubated a brand-new brand. It’s been a story-led strategy. We created over 200 minutes of content that we posted on YouTube, supported by a significant licensing, merchandising and marketing program. It is stunning, the animation is super cool and the characters are colorful and unique. It allows us an opportunity to reach kids in that digital ecosystem where they’re sampling and consuming so much content. There isn’t anything else like it on YouTube and from what we can see globally on digital channels. We’ve rolled it out successfully. We’re getting ready to start what we would consider our second season, although on digital you keep rolling episodes out on platforms. Later in 2018, we’re going to be posting some new content, and we’ll match that with a linear strategy as well. We’re going to be rolling it out on a number of linear channels internationally. We’ve been very pleased with how it has performed, both as a story-driven brand as well as how it’s activated our brand blueprint across our toy and game and consumer product portfolios.

TV KIDS: What’s the process for constructing a brand blueprint on each property?
DAVIS: If you think about the brand blueprint as a wheel, at the center of the wheel we place storytelling and consumer insights. We adapt our storytelling and how we activate our brand blueprint based on consumer insights. We do a lot of social listening, a lot of social scraping. We talk to our consumer base daily in lots of forms and formats, in person through focus-group testing and social media. We study the ways kids are consuming our content in a theatrical environment, television environment and digital environment. Storytelling and consumer insights activate our brand blueprint across toys, games, consumer products, lifestyle licensing, digital gaming, immersive entertainment experiences, television and film. And although the basic tenets of what I just described in a brand blueprint don’t change, it’s about activating all those areas in an immersive way. Obviously, we evolve the strategy based on insights. It’s a dynamic process. Although we’re a large company, we’re very nimble and have a process that allows us to move at a rapid pace and to be proactive as well as reactive to changes in consumer tastes based on insights and feedback. It’s kind of our secret sauce!

TV KIDS: Kids are taking greater control over their viewing habits and are creating more content on their own. How does that inform everything you’re doing at Hasbro?
DAVIS: If you look at Nerf, for instance, there is a tremendous amount of content created by our fan base—kids who love what has become a lifestyle brand. [For Nerf] 97 percent of the content on digital channels is user-generated. We only post about 3 percent of the content, which, as a story-led company, is not typical! Nerf is a great example of where kids have adopted a brand, been immersed in this “Nerf Nation” lifestyle, boys and girls, and it has stimulated them to create their own content. They are effectively the content creators and the programmers for Nerf. I think we’re seeing that across multiple brands.

TV KIDS: You have so many long-running brands. What’s been the key to keeping them relevant to kids over the years?
DAVIS: First and foremost, it starts with great storytelling and great characters. We have an amazing creative group—both in the studio as well as in our brand and design teams. They work closely to ensure that we are telling innovative and fresh stories, building worlds around interesting characters that continue to inspire consumers, and traveling across the multiple touchpoints of engagement.

Transformers is a great example of that. It’s a brand that has been around for 30 years and has expanded throughout the years across multiple touchpoints—including publishing, animation, film, video games and consumer products—and a very broad demographic. That helps us to keep brands fresh and alive. We can innovate in lots of different areas.

My Little Pony is the same. We launched a show in 2010 reimagining that brand from its 30-plus-year heritage. We’re going to be making our 200th episode this year. It’s been successful in introducing a new audience in a different way to the brand as well. You have to recognize that every few years we get a new audience, so we have to be sure that we are listening to that consumer, to that mom, to that dad, about things that are important to them. We are being proactive and disruptive in the way that we present our brands to the consumer in a more immersive way.