Keynote: WildBrain’s Eric Ellenbogen

WildBrain CEO and Vice Chair Eric Ellenbogen shared his strategies for navigating the shifting landscape in his TV Kids Festival keynote today, which was followed by a screening of the buzzy new series The Brilliant World of Tom Gates.

Ellenbogen was interviewed by World Screen and TV Kids’ group editorial director, Anna Carugati, on the third day of the TV Kids Festival. She began the conversation by asking Ellenbogen what attracted him to taking the helm of WildBrain—then known as DHX Media—back in 2019.

“I was well familiar with the company even before I came to it,” Ellenbogen said. “They were a friendly competitor when I was at DreamWorks and at Classic Media. In fact, I sought to acquire many of the same properties they ended up with, such as Teletubbies, In the Night Garden and Peanuts, which is the crown jewel asset in the company.” Ellenbogen was also attracted to the company’s “family-first focus” and a collection of assets that were “well-curated and relatable,” he said. “What they rolled up over the years was very similar, frankly, to what I had done at Classic Media and later at DreamWorks.” He was also excited about the potential for mining a library that had a lot of IP that had been either “unexploited or underexploited—that leads to so many possibilities. Peanuts content is a good example, where no new production other than a single theatrical film had been created in decades.”

Carugati then asked Ellenbogen about his initial priorities for the company and how those changed once the pandemic hit early last year. One of his first focuses was on “bringing cohesion to what, at the time that I joined the company, was a relatively disparate collection of assets.” This included the CPLG licensing and merchandising company, production studios and the WildBrain AVOD division. “So the first thing was unifying under a single name. Everybody was operating under a different business, and I think that, at least in the industry, many did not know that these were all under the same ownership umbrella. As important as putting a new name to the company was integrating the team. It was about integrating all the different parts of the company and singing from the same lead sheet.”

The next priority was “doubling down our investment in premier creative.” Ellenbogen also targeted China as a key growth opportunity, and AVOD, with that segment rebranded as WildBrain Spark. “That is the most rapidly growing part of the company, frankly outpacing the amount of on-demand viewing across all of AVOD.”

On what media companies have to do to navigate a continually shifting landscape, Ellenbogen noted, “It is about being nimble. One thing that has not changed in the media landscape is that great shows are watched by a lot of people. With an incredible focus on creating great content and on recognized IP, it doesn’t matter whether it is a holographic projection on the moon or a GAF View-Master—it is all the same. It’s just about great content.”

However, WildBrain has leaned into AVOD, Ellenbogen noted: “We think it is very much the future.” Given the importance of AVOD, the company has also become “obsessed by data analytics,” he continued. “That is something new. It isn’t just about being a content creator and distributor and a center of creative excellence. Now you’ve got to know the numbers. It’s ad tech; it’s audience viewing patterns. Because of our Spark division, we’ve become much more sophisticated about how we serve up content, and we’re understanding so much more about our audience. There isn’t the disintermediation that there always has been, where we would have to depend on our telecast partners. Now we are speaking directly to the audience.”

Ellenbogen then spoke in greater detail about the AVOD business WildBrain Spark. “We arguably are the number one or number two AVOD destination for kids,” he said. “We think something like one in three kids visits WildBrain Spark. They watch full-length shows. We are a globally COPPA-compliant network. I think that safety-first has been critical in our curation of content. That has been essential to our identity and ethos as a company.”

WildBrain Spark did have to adjust to YouTube’s new “made for kids” policies last year. “No longer were the participants able to have any social media interaction with one another. And importantly, no more data was collected directly on individual viewers. That was an interesting change because we are also, with four channels in Canada, in the traditional cable-TV business. Ad sales are now more closely aligned to how we would sell cable TV, which is a contextual advertising sale. It’s something we really understand well and already had built an ad-sales organization to serve that particular requirement. I think that’s what has changed in the AVOD space for us and it is evolving. We are now building a very robust ad-sales team and are helping to educate advertisers on how to reach this audience.”

Ellenbogen stressed that the WildBrain Spark demo is a “co-viewing audience. It’s not just kids. So particularly with our emphasis on preschool, we are reaching caretakers and parents. With smart TVs, an enormous portion of the viewing for YouTube is on big TVs. And when they are viewed on television, as opposed to on a computer or a mobile device, largely those are co-viewing experiences. That has evolved the opportunity for advertisers in our business.”

Viewership exploded amid the pandemic, Ellenbogen said. “Though watch time will likely decline with a return to school and normal life, the discovery process has been amazing. It’s about discovering new shows, discovering our network. It has, to some extent, counteracted the downdraft in the advertising market. We are seeing plenty of green shoots now and a return to market. But we did have this double whammy of both the ‘made for kids’ regulations, which disrupted the entire way in which advertisers bought the network, combined with the COVID downdraft in advertising. We’re seeing restoration in both areas and frankly are very encouraged.”

Carugati asked Ellenbogen about how his teams approach giving brands the best exposure and monetization they can get across the landscape. “Exposing the content, both new productions and library, on as many platforms as possible is the way to go. There is an emphasis now on multiple platforms and on AVOD distribution. One of our premier shows had been sought by one of the platforms on an exclusive basis. We thought it to be not so attractive and eschewed what was a ready deal, and instead syndicated the content across rev-share deals in AVOD, and I think did better in one year than what had been on offer for something like a three- or four-year deal. A lot of it is understanding the content. One of the things that we love about working with some of these platforms like Samsung and Comcast Xfinity is the availability of data. We get numbers back. We know who’s watching our shows, and that informs our development process as well as our distribution strategy.”

Ellenbogen then talked about WildBrain’s expanded relationship with Apple TV+ for Peanuts content. “In my view, the creative content that is being generated by the Peanuts team is the best work the studio has ever done. Because of the legacy as well as the new creative development around Peanuts, we’ve been able to attract amazing creators, animators, storyboard artists, directors. For me, it’s often keeping those creative teams together. One of the great dividends of the expanded relationship with Apple is having attracted these creators. We can now keep that team together for years and years to come. The other thing is that the creative possibilities around the Peanuts oeuvre are considerable. We’re going to be exploring all kinds of characters and new storylines. It’s been wonderful, honestly, for me to work with the Schulz family, who bring an incredible historical perspective as well as contemporary ideas. It’s been a huge win across the entire company.”

Asked about the future of linear channels, Ellenbogen responded: “Linear viewership is declining, and it’s been in decline for a decade. That said, many of the linear telecasters, either through catch-up or their own platforms, are smartly diversifying into on-demand viewing. It’s about offering a suite of opportunities to viewers and ways of delivering the content wherever the audience is, whenever they are watching and curating that content as well. In that respect, linear still plays a significant role, perhaps more so outside the U.S. than in the U.S. I have the greatest regard for public broadcasters because they fill an educational void that often commercial telecasters just don’t support. They remain an important foundation for our business and our relationships, and we’re in a number of co-production deals with linear telecasters globally. They still play a big role. That said, we love the SVOD platforms, largely because they have funded incredible content. The quality is exceptional. One of the things that is exciting for me is the amount of great international content that has found its way to global audiences. That is an exciting aspect of the change in the media landscape.”

For the 12 to 24 months ahead, one of Ellenbogen’s priorities will be around “reigniting so many of the beloved brands that we’re the fortunate stewards of. When you have a piece of library content that has succeeded over the decades, there is something that the audience responded to, whether it’s about values or delightful characters or relationships. That gives you an enormous head start. Often the reinvention process, while preserving the DNA of what made something work, has so many possibilities. A really fun part of the job is taking these great legacy brands and reintroducing them to a new audience.” And on that front, WildBrain undoubtedly has a trove of classic brands to work with, including Strawberry Shortcake, Caillou and Teletubbies. “Audiences were drawn to those for very good reasons. That lends those properties well to reinvention if we can rekindle the appeal.”

Further building WildBrain’s presence in the AVOD space is another critical priority, Ellenbogen added. WildBrain Spark “is an incredible brand megaphone,” he noted. “We view that network as driving not only views and advertising revenue, but also consumer products, being able to launch things, being able to better understand audience tastes and patterns. So it’s a two-way communications channel for us that I have to say informs a lot of our efforts and allows us to do a great deal of experimentation. It isn’t about: we have to get 20 episodes of 22 minutes done. We can do a lot of different things. For our studio in Vancouver, it gives them an incredible canvas to experiment with new IP.”

The session concluded with the presentation of an episode of The Brilliant World of Tom Gates, a Sky Kids commission produced by Black Camel, Wild Child Animation and TG Entertainment that WildBrain is distributing worldwide. The 20×11-minute series for kids 7 to 12 is based on the best-selling book series by Liz Pichon.