TVKIDS
Vince Commisso, president and CEO of 9 Story Media Group, discussed the company’s union with Scholastic as day two of the TV Kids Festival kicked off today.
Scholastic closed its acquisition of 9 Story last summer. Commisso weighed in on the opportunities for 9 Story going forward in a keynote conversation with TV Kids’ Kristin Brzoznowski that you can view here.
“This was a good cultural fit for us,” Commisso said on the impetus for the deal. “We’ve been in business with Scholastic for a few years, and there’s always been a similarity between the way the two companies operate. Secondly, we see this broadly as a marriage between IP and capabilities. Scholastic Entertainment has great literary-based IP and development capabilities to turn that IP into TV and feature film content. 9 Story has tremendous capabilities in production and development, which are now combined under Scholastic Entertainment, and merchandising and licensing that we can bring to bear on that IP that will allow us to control the IP more directly within the Scholastic family.”
Brzoznowski asked Commisso to drill down into some of the synergies for the two companies going forward.
“We can extend high-quality IP into books, television, movies and YouTube and support that underlying IP and the relevant extensions,” he said. “If you do it across three or four IP extensions, there are opportunities to create more support for the IP, which is necessary today because you have to break through the clutter. There are 30,000 kids’ IPs on YouTube. Breaking through that takes a lot of work and distribution capacity—and no one has better distribution capacity for literature for kids than Scholastic does. So, we have a leg up going in. If we support that with YouTube and with the development of a TV show, you can build a robust content IP that the audience becomes aware of quickly. Once you distribute on those platforms, you can engage more fully, create more content and then extend in terms of your broader IP strategy.”
Commisso then showcased how the two companies are working collaboratively to mine for book-based IP that is ripe for screen adaptation. “Scholastic has the best distribution channel for kids’ IP in the world,” he said. “They know if something hits right away. We have a sense going in up front, and we can test it with YouTube. If both areas show us that there’s interest from the audience we’re going after, then we get behind it and make a full investment in that IP to bring it to market. There is data available to us to help us identify which ones we think will work and are proving to work.”
Known IP is a dominant theme in the marketplace today, Commisso explained, noting the company brought four brands to MIPCOM: a preschool extension to The Magic School Bus, the book-based Sixteen Souls, the Roblox game-inspired Momoguro and one original IP, Juno The Jellyfish. “That reflects the ratio of the day,” he said. “We think that will change again. We don’t know when, but it always has, and it will. It’ll be a construct of what the market does next or what catalytic event happens within the market to change the way it is today.”
The session then shifted to strategies for franchise building in a fragmented marketplace. “You have to consider how the IP will work within those touchpoints and how you approach those touchpoints given the IP. We’re required to develop a more bespoke approach with each IP that we bring to market. We know how many of the touchpoints we have to hit and gain traction on to be successful. We know how many we have to start with given the nature of the IP. We just don’t know within that context if it’s going to work or not. That’s our challenge. And the investment is greater, so we have to develop ways to test and test more quickly in the market.”
Using YouTube is key for brand-building strategies and more, Commisso said, outlining the various ways 9 Story taps into the platform.
“We have a robust digital-first pipeline, one of which we brought to market with a show we partnered with Paris Hilton on, Paris & Pups,” Commisso explained. “We’ve got tremendous interest from toy partners and retailers.”
9 Story also works with its traditional commissioning partners to seed launches on YouTube and further build engagement after a series launches, and it is mining its extensive back catalog to build interest in those brands on the platform.
The conversation then shifted to how 9 Story is navigating the game-changing shifts in the distribution business. “There’s a real step back in the market around content writ large, but especially around kids in terms of the approach that will be successful in getting the eyeballs that these platforms once had. We’ve been able to take our library and bring it to market ourselves through YouTube and other channels, and we’ve been able to find partners that don’t traditionally pay the way that platforms used to pay in the past, but it’s helped us grow in that part of the business. Kids have moved to different platforms, and as long as you can make them aware of your content, more people who want those eyeballs will acquire your content and put it on their platform, and you’ll find the revenue that was at one place is now somewhere else, but you’re either where you were or a little ahead, perhaps.”
FAST is one of these emerging windows, with 9 Story already having entered this space. The success of this sector is going to be “dependent upon the behavior of the advertising dollars,” Commisso said. “Will they migrate to FAST channels? Will they migrate to AVOD? Some combination thereof? How will that balance out? How much money will be available for kids’ content in the unregulated advertising space? Where will the regulation wind up? There will be regulations, and there should be. It’s a question of what impact that will have on the advertising platforms. We’ve seen it already on YouTube. I think it will be applied more broadly, especially in the U.S. We’ll have to see how that plays out.”
Brand-name content is able to cut through in FAST, with Commisso highlighting properties like Magic School Bus and Clifford. “There’s strong demand from partners for that content, and then we also have the Scholastic brand, which we can offer to our audience and their parents. I think that puts us in good shape, but we will have to see how the market responds broadly in regard to FAST.”
