Nina Hahn

October 2007

Now in its 28th year, Nickelodeon has given the world extremely successful children’s brands like Dora the Explorer and SpongeBob SquarePants. Reaching some 470 million homes worldwide via channels, programming blocks, broadband services and international program sales, Nickelodeon is now tapping into its international expertise to create a new portfolio of content outside of the U.S. Leading this charge is Nina Hahn as Nickelodeon’s VP of international development, who speaks with TV Kids about new projects in the works, attracting talent and creating content for global audiences.

TV KIDS: What has been your strategy for this international-development initiative?

HAHN: Nickelodeon International, like Nickelodeon U.S.’s development group, is tasked with signing great talent with great cool projects that we think should live on Nick globally. That is the mission statement for this division, which is a really fun day job, I might add. It was a very conscious effort on our part to create a go-to place for all of the talent that exists outside of the U.S. It was a natural maturing process to include what we do really well in the U.S. and extend it region-specific outside of the U.S.

Our budget structures are different and we need to work in a lean, mean fashion. We had to come up with interesting ways to get the same end result—have a property that we could test in true Nick style and fit the brand—but do it in a more cost-effective fashion. One of the ways we did that was to introduce a shorts program; the shorts themselves don’t function as filler, they function as back-door pilots. We find projects that we think have the legs to go on as long form and produce them as shorts, all the while in parallel developing on paper a long-form incarnation of the idea, whether it’s a pilot script or a bible or a storyboard. One of the projects that has followed that model is one we did with Nick Italy called Hiro. We’re airing the shorts on all the channels, in the U.S. as well, online as well, and seeing if there’s any stickiness and then putting it through a rigorous research process to see if kids liked it, and we greenlight based on that experience. We’re in the middle of that on a project called Oasis, which we’re doing with a French CG house called TeamTO, a Korean producer called Tuba and TF1.

TV KIDS: How do you negotiate working with that many partners on a given project?

HAHN: In the abstract you feel like it’s impossible. But somehow, it’s like a family—everybody finds their position and it’s worked really, really effectively. That said, Nickelodeon is in the starter position if we located the project, brought the partners together, and that brings with it a certain amount of punch on the development side as well. Oasis is one occasion where we do have a fair amount of partners, but there are only two broadcasters and we think very similarly in this case, so it’s quite easy to have clarity on final say.

TV KIDS: How many projects do you want to have in development at any one time?

HAHN: At the moment, as we’re building our division, we would like to have as many as we possibly can. As we’re taking this engagement-before-we-get-married approach, it allows us to have a lot more in the pipeline than we normally would because we can spread ourselves across a number of short orders, versus one or two giant orders.

TV KIDS: Apart from Hiro and Oasis, what are some of the other projects you have in the works?

HAHN: We’re very excited about Purple & Brown, which is a project that launched [on Nickelodeon U.K.] as a series of shorts before I came here. We found it was really relevant and resonated with kids and we decided to take it to the next step and discuss how we could look at it as a longer-form series. That’s another one we’re in the middle of working on and it’s one that we’re really excited about.

TV KIDS: What goes into taking a short-form interstitial and expanding it into a longer series?

HAHN: Some of it is instinct and some of it is research. You show it to kids and see if they want more. You go through the same creative filters and questioning about caring for the characters [as you do when developing long-form series].

TV KIDS: When you are developing shows as shorts, you have the added benefit that they are ready for multiplatform use, to be distributed online and on mobile.

HAHN: Yes. We’re really trying to respond to what we are hearing from kids, which is that they’re blind to platforms. They don’t care about the difference from one to another. We’re working on projects which hopefully will just exist on all of those platforms without much ado.

TV KIDS: In terms of finding new talent, is it mostly producers coming to you, or do you have a team scouring the web and other platforms looking for good ideas?

HAHN: All of the above, and then some. The greatest thing about this job is you just get to be a hunter all day long, finding great things, and you never, ever know where they are going to come from. Whether it’s going to come from a producer who comes into your office or a book or a design company or a toy line. You find them through lots of different ways. And we troll for properties in lots of different ways as well. The beauty is, because we have 29 channels across the world, you’ve got 29 trollers across the world as well, which is helpful!

TV KIDS: You mentioned earlier the importance of research. Can you tell me more about that process?

HAHN: Research is a really big part of our creative mission. We definitely form a [full relationship] with kids, hearing what they’re looking for and what they’re doing. In the case of international, we’re very curious about the global kid. Is there a global kid? Where do cultures dovetail? It’s a big part of what we need to address in addition to what each individual region addresses for their kids. Also, what they’re doing online, what they’re not doing online, what they want, what they don’t want, what girls are watching, what boys are watching, when they’re watching it, how they’re watching it, live action versus animation. The kinds of research we do speak to all that, and we then use it in what we develop.

TV KIDS: What are some of the things you need to focus on to develop shows that will speak to that “global kid”?

HAHN: There are definitely some dos and don’ts that you have to be mindful of. Certain diversity issues are an interesting challenge for global versus regional. If there’s a project that speaks to diversity issues in the U.S. or if the humor is based on inner-city elements or things that are just not relevant elsewhere, that can become a challenge. What we do find works globally is comedy. That’s the piece we really try and stay quite close to.

TV KIDS: Do you think the properties coming out of the international arm have a different sensibility than the U.S. shows?

HAHN: We really try to augment what they’re doing. We’re bringing a very different voice to the table than what they already [have] there.

TV KIDS: And are those projects coming from all over the world, or mostly from the traditionally strong markets like the U.K. or France?

HAHN: [We’re receiving projects from] Asia, Latin America, Australia. In fact, we have a very strong representation of ideas on the slate from those [parts of the world]. Ideas can come from everywhere. We have one from Latin America, one from Italy, one in development from Japan, one from Korea, we’re working towards a German one, and we’re going to have a bunch from Australia. So it’s definitely very United Nations.