Rob Lawes and Charlie Caminada

TV Kids
Weekly, February 26, 2008

Ludorum

The British
animation market may be going through some challenging times, but Rob Lawes and
Charlie Caminada, the CEO and COO, respectively, of Ludorum, are feeling
optimistic about their slate of properties, led by Chuggington, which was recently snapped up by the
BBC in the U.K., Super RTL in Germany, TF1 in France and ABC Australia, among
other broadcasters.

The series,
Ludorum’s first, was launched on the international market at MIPCOM and has
attracted interest, Caminada says, because it “reflects all of the values,
educational and prosocial, that parents and broadcasters look for in a
modern-day preschool show. This is really a train-based show for the 21st
century with all the contemporary messages and content that we think will enrich
children’s lives and parents’ appreciation of the show.”

Ludorum is
building a major off-screen campaign for the property, with a master toy deal
in place with Learning Curve Brands and plans for a significant online
presence. “To have a master toy licensee on board at such an early stage
alongside the existing broadcasters gives us a tremendous amount of impetus,”
says Lawes. “It’s fair to say we’re targeting a significant amount of retail
commitment globally. We’re looking at building something that’s got great
longevity. We’re going to be very focused on making sure that the
consumer-products side and the partners we’re bringing in and the development
of the toy platforms are really relevant. That’s so crucial to do.”

Building
lasting brands is something both Lawes and Caminada are familiar with, having
run HIT Entertainment for a number of years prior to its sale in 2005 to Apax
Partners. “With Peter [Orton] we had taken the business from zero to nearly a
billion U.S. dollars in value,” Caminada says. “We’d had a very successful
strike rate in developing shows like Bob the Builder and acquiring shows like Thomas the
Tank Engine and Barney. By the time we sold the company,
85-87 percent of HIT’s business was consumer products and home entertainment.
Whereas when it started it was 100 percent television.”

Staying in the
kids’ content arena was a natural choice for both executives. “We knew the
business very well,” Caminada notes. “We had a very good address book and the shareholders
of HIT, when it was a public company, had done extremely well—we had
returned £220 million to them—so four or five of the largest
institutional shareholders, including DC Thomson, were prepared to support us
in the new venture.”

When Ludorum was
established in April 2006, Caminada says the company had two goals: “Develop IP
where we felt it really had strong merit, and be acquisitive where we thought
there was value to be unlocked and where we could return good money to the
shareholders.”

At the heart
of Ludorum’s strategy is being selective, Caminada says, given the increasingly
competitive kids’ landscape. “Television license fees are much diminished. If
you don’t own a property that has strong consumer products and
home-entertainment potential, then it’s very hard to even recoup production
costs, much less make money out of these shows. Retail space is competitive,
licensees are becoming choosier. Even if you develop a whole string of
different things, you’re really going to sell one or two shows to the BBC or
PBS or Nick Jr. or Super RTL or TF1 every year or two. We just decided we would
be very focused. We wanted to take a lot of care to make sure that what we were
developing was going to have value down the line. If you do get it right, you
can have a franchise for a very long period of time, taking advantage of a new
audience every three or four years.”

Caminada says
that Ludorum is taking a broad view on the kids’ market, eyeing properties for
children up to the age of ten. “The door is very much open and we want to work
with the creative community to develop projects if we can find the right ones.”

Chuggington, a train-based property, is the
company’s first show and is due for delivery in 2009. Also in the works is Dennis
& Gnasher, a brand
owned by one of Ludorum’s backers, DC Thomson. That series launches on the BBC
in the fall of 2009. “We were involved in the first two series that were made
in the 1990s,” Caminada says. “The property has been very much modernized in
terms of design and in terms of the scripting, so that it reflects a modern
audience.”

—By
Mansha Daswani