Olivier Dumont Talks Franchise Management

TV Kids Festival continued this afternoon with Olivier Dumont, president of eOne Family Brands, discussing the unit’s approach to developing new IP and managing known franchises from the extensive Hasbro portfolio.

You can watch Dumont’s conversation with Anna Carugati, group editorial director of TV Kids, in its entirety here. “We’re developing and producing shows based on existing brands like My Little Pony, PJ Masks, Peppa Pig, Transformers and Power Rangers, as well as completely new original properties such as Kiya and more in our development pipeline. Most are in animation, but we also have Power Rangers, a live-action series.”

Dumont continued, “Our slate covers the full spectrum of demographics and genders, always with a strong commercial angle to them. We’re looking to develop properties with significant licensing and merchandising potential.”

Hasbro completed its acquisition of eOne in 2019. “The eOne team brings extensive expertise on the content-creation and brand-management sides,” said Dumont of the integration. “That was combined with Hasbro’s strong consumer products, toy and game expertise. So it gives the combined organization a true advantage in the marketplace. Our teams share many of the same values and that deep desire to be a brand-led business as perthe brand blueprint strategy, which was crafted by Brian Goldner and the Hasbro senior leadership team prior to the integration. That blueprint strategy is 100 percent aligned with the brand-led business strategy eOne has been implementing over the past 15 years. A good chunk of the last two years has been spent on turning that brand-led vision into reality for the combined portfolio.”

On navigating the landscape today, Dumont noted, “It’s super hard to break through, so it’s critical to have brands with content rolling out on as many platforms as possible, in order to register with the target demographic. This means creating more short-form and interactive content to complement the traditional content produced for linear and VOD. That’s the piece that is probably more difficult for smaller companies. Having deeper pockets [helps] when it comes to marketing these brands, to make sure you’re directing consumers to these different platforms.”

The target demo of a brand will inform the strategy, Dumont said. In preschool, having exposure on multiple different platforms is crucial. For example, Peppa Pig has been “very strong on linear, on various SVOD platforms and YouTube. That boosts the awareness for the brand and allows it to remain relevant commercially despite the masses of preschool shows constantly launching.”

Dumont has a long history with Peppa Pig, starting his work on the brand when it was a hit U.K. property but had yet to conquer other shores. At the time, he set out to understand “what it was about the strategy that had been implemented in the U.K. to reproduce it in as many markets as possible. That’s what we did.” That included making sure the show had the right home and scheduling back-to-back episodes. “It’s taken a long time to have Peppa be successful in that many markets. We were building it in every single one of these markets individually.”

Episodes are still being produced for the beloved series. “The beauty of Peppa is that because it’s about daily life, it can be about anything. Like Seinfeld for preschoolers! You can tackle so many subject matters relevant to kids’ daily lives. The number of themes you can tackle is so vast it has allowed Astley Baker Davies to continue making episodes. We’re going to be making the new seasons with Karrot Animation.”

The company is also working on new content for Transformers: the comedy series Transformers: BotBots for Netflix and a show for Nickelodeon that “brings humans into the Transformers world. There will be equal parts comedy and action. It’s going to bring a lot more kids, including girls, into the universe of the series.”

Addressing the use of data analytics in making programming decisions, Dumont said, “We use it a lot more directly in our digital slate. We’re creating all sorts of short-form animated content in all sorts of techniques—CGI, 2D, stop-frame. It’s a quicker turnaround, so we’re using the trends that we see coming through on YouTube. More than data, it’s insights from focus-group testing and more traditional ways of qualitative and not just quantitative research to inform the types of themes and the development process on our longer-form series. We use a lot of research in developing these shows.”

The digital team is developing short-form extensions to existing long-form IP, Dumont said. “If it’s animated, we’ll create in-real-life content, as we did with PJ Masks, and that’s massively successful. Kids love putting on their costumes. We’re creating live-action segments with real kids. We’re doing that on Power Rangers, too; we have a show called Power Rangers: Kids Force with younger kids who transform into Power Rangers. We’re rolling that out on YouTube. We’re doing a lot of stop-frame content on each of our different brands.”

New shows will be launched with an array of different content extensions, Dumont added, allowing “kids to interact in many different ways with those characters.”