{"id":23164,"date":"2022-06-08T08:13:12","date_gmt":"2022-06-08T12:13:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/dev2.worldscreen.com\/tvkids\/dubits-david-kleeman-wildbrains-anne-loi-metaverse\/"},"modified":"2022-07-08T11:21:01","modified_gmt":"2022-07-08T15:21:01","slug":"dubits-david-kleeman-wildbrains-anne-loi-on-the-metaverse","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/worldscreen.com\/tvkids\/dubits-david-kleeman-wildbrains-anne-loi-on-the-metaverse\/","title":{"rendered":"Dubit\u2019s David Kleeman, WildBrain\u2019s Anne Loi on the Metaverse"},"content":{"rendered":"

Dubit\u2019s David Kleeman outlined how IP owners can extend their brands into the metaverse before catching up with WildBrain\u2019s Anne Loi on how that indie giant is exploring this new landscape at the TV Kids Summer Festival.<\/p>\n

You can watch the session featuring Kleeman, senior VP of global trends at research and strategy consultancy and digital studio Dubit, and Loi, executive VP for M&A and chief commercial officer at WildBrain, in its entirety here<\/a><\/strong>.<\/p>\n

Kleeman noted at the outset that \u201cthere are as many definitions of the metaverse as there are people talking about it.\u201d<\/p>\n

He continued: \u201cThere is as yet no real metaverse. There are little pieces of it. You may have heard the expression that the future is here, it\u2019s just not equally distributed. Well, the metaverse is here, but it\u2019s in pieces, and we need to put it together. The great thing about that is that we can envision the metaverse that we want, not just take the one handed by the big companies or anyone like that. We can build a metaverse that is great for kids, building on the brand equity that we as television executives have built over the years.\u201d<\/p>\n

At its most basic definition, the metaverse describes \u201cimmersive, virtual, global, always-on spaces,\u201d Kleeman explained. \u201cThe real idea is that it lowers frustration barriers to people doing the things they want to do. You can be a gamer\u2014you can play a game or make a game. You can tell stories. You can be part of somebody else\u2019s stories. You can learn. You can teach. We mostly find people are using it right now for socializing, communicating, gameplay, and they\u2019re becoming creators. Shopping is emerging in it. It\u2019s more about brand awareness and affinity than about actual shopping.\u201d<\/p>\n

Roblox, Kleeman said, is an \u201cemerging metaverse,\u201d noting, \u201cYou can play any or all of the games on the platform with just one download. You can attend special events. We\u2019re producing concerts in the metaverse, but also kids themselves were having their birthday parties in the metaverse during the pandemic. It\u2019s a place to hang out with friends. You can customize gear, customize your avatar, do a lot of self-expression and earn and spend in-game currency. How popular is it? Over 50 percent of U.S. 9- to 12-year-olds play on Roblox at least weekly, and they\u2019re spending their money there right now.\u201d<\/p>\n

Kleeman offered four key takeaways of Dubit’s thinking about the metaverse. First, \u201cno child will use the term \u2018metaverse,\u2019\u201d Kleeman noted. \u201cFor them, it means they just get to play the way they want to play.\u201d Metaverse experiences done well \u201cwill blend communication, socializing, play and learning\u2014you\u2019ll be able to do all those things all at once. And you\u2019ll have a more consistent experience when you put down your smartphone and pick up your laptop or tablet. You won\u2019t have to hack solutions. The other thing about the metaverse is, if you don\u2019t find what you want, create it. Today\u2019s young people are creators on these platforms. There are millions and millions of Roblox games, and substantially, they are made by the users themselves. And finally, we can ensure safety and privacy from the start. With the metaverse, because it\u2019s not here yet, we hope to create it from the start as a safe, engaging, fun place for kids where they can do what they want.\u201d<\/p>\n

Why should kids\u2019 IP owners care about the metaverse? Because that is where kids are, Kleeman said, spurred in part by so much time at home during the pandemic. \u201cKids who could no longer be together in person were using metaverse-like platforms\u2014Roblox, Fortnite, Minecraft, Core, Discord\u2014to replace the socializing that they couldn\u2019t do in person. As a television company, you need to be thinking about how kids are going to discover you: through a game or the TV? And finally, this is a generation that considers authenticity and connection with their favorite brands to be really important. They need to sense that you\u2019re listening to them. And an immersive space in the metaverse is a really good way to have that two-way exchange with your fans.\u201d<\/p>\n

IP owners with limited budgets should not despair about the level of investment required, Kleeman noted. \u201cYou don\u2019t need to build a really big, deep, always-on, long-term game to be present in the metaverse. We\u2019re doing a lot of short-term activations. Or you can integrate with an existing game.\u201d<\/p>\n

Kleeman went on to discuss the idea of \u201cfanatomy\u201d and how that might require IP owners to be a little less controlling over how their brand appears in the metaverse. \u201cYou serve up your IP the way you want it to be, and fans come back to you and say, Yeah, but wouldn\u2019t it be cool if? If you respond to that, even if you don\u2019t do what they suggest, if you just show that you\u2019re listening, you deepen that fan\u2019s experience, and you make them want to go and share it with their friends, and you make them think, This is a place for me because they listen to me. Fanatomy, in the case of the metaverse, is going to mean letting go of your brand a little bit. It\u2019s the hardest thing for IP owners to do, but we\u2019re seeing some compelling reasons for doing it. Young people chase their favorite brands across all the platforms that they use. If they love something, they will pursue it in toys, products, clothes and games, on television, or wherever they can find it. And they now come to expect it to be multiplatform. They want to be creators. They want to share their way of thinking about their favorite content, and they deeply want that authenticity\u2014that idea that a brand is speaking to them.\u201d<\/p>\n

There are various approaches brand owners can take, Kleeman explained. \u201cSome of them are just licensing assets to be where their audiences are\u2014so selling T-shirts in Roblox, for example. We\u2019re also finding that brands are open now to allowing user-generated content as long as it doesn\u2019t violate the brand principles. There are 2,000 LEGO games in Roblox, none of them created by LEGO. A month after Squid Game<\/em> debuted on Netflix, there were 100,000 Squid Game<\/em> games created by users. Netflix said, This is great, we are not only expanding our audience with these games, but we\u2019re also learning how our audience saw the program and how they want to engage with the program for future seasons.\u201d<\/p>\n

Thinking about the metaverse can begin at any time in an IP\u2019s lifecycle, Kleeman stated. \u201cIf you are in the creative development phase, you can create playable concept testing that\u2019s going to be much less expensive than producing a pilot. You can watch how your fans play with your characters, play with your settings, what they like, what they don\u2019t like, and use that in your development. We had an experience with a brand-new television IP where we launched a very small Roblox experience\u2014you could live in the setting of the program\u2014and spent about \u00a31,000 ($1,250) to promote it. We got tens of thousands of views in the first weekend at an acquisition cost of about $0.04 per user. Now compare that to the App Store, where it\u2019s multiple dollars per user. Some fans made videos because no one had seen this IP before. Free promotion via the fans.\u201d<\/p>\n

Kleeman then engaged in a conversation with Loi at WildBrain about how that company is approaching metaverse opportunities. \u201cInternally, we talk less about metaverse in general and more about how kids are engaging in the various platforms. At WildBrain, our origin is really about storytelling. What form of storytelling is this versus other ways of getting our content out there?\u201d<\/p>\n

When determining which IPs are suited for digital activation, the process starts with looking at the characters and thinking about if they are best suited to longer- or shorter-form storytelling, Loi said. \u201cI don\u2019t think there is a very specific type of content that is only good for short-form or only good for long-form. I think the skill set is really about how you tell the story with those characters.\u201d<\/p>\n

Loi continued, \u201cI think people are still trying to figure out how to tell stories in the metaverse because so much interactivity happens. It\u2019s not that different from back when we were making mobile games or online web games. There\u2019s always that challenge of, when you hand control over to the player, how do you create the world where they can tell the story their own way? A lot of our content development people tend to look at that as one form of telling, not the only form of telling stories.\u201d<\/p>\n

WildBrain is allowing some latitude in how its brands are being used by fans in the metaverse. \u201cIt used to be the hotbed of plagiarizing, counterfeits and whatnot, both digitally and physically. We spent all of our time trying to squash those things. Now it\u2019s like, great, the more the better. That\u2019s really changed the way people feel about authenticity in developing IP.\u201d<\/p>\n

Loi also discussed the challenges of discoverability on Roblox. \u201cThere\u2019s what, 40 million games on Roblox? Discoverability will be an issue. It\u2019s a very democratized platform. If your game is not good, people just simply won\u2019t come. You don\u2019t need anybody else to tell you that you have to do better. We love that, but it\u2019s challenging as a company wanting to take risks on these things. Six to eight months ago, our thinking was that an individual stand-alone game is the way to do it. Now we\u2019ve evolved. If you are looking for your brand itself to get noticed, we see a lot of success with in-game collaboration with another very well-known game. We will create experiences as part of that bigger game, but that\u2019s very brand specific. We\u2019re doing testing with kids who have played it\u2014before and after. Do they have a higher awareness level of that brand? Our thinking has shifted back and forth on where do you actually want to create a stand-alone experience? There has to be some pretty special reason to do that. [You can] collaborate with where the big eyeballs already are and try to take advantage of that.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Dubit\u2019s David Kleeman outlined how IP owners can extend their brands into the metaverse before catching up with WildBrain\u2019s Anne Loi on how that indie giant is exploring this new landscape at the TV Kids Summer Festival.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":290,"featured_media":23165,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"pmpro_default_level":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[21],"tags":[2314,6527,6528,5973,1156],"class_list":["post-23164","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","","category-top-stories","tag-anne-loi","tag-david-kleeman","tag-dubit","tag-tv-kids-summer-festival","tag-wildbrain","pmpro-has-access"],"yoast_head":"\nDubit\u2019s David Kleeman, WildBrain\u2019s Anne Loi on the Metaverse - TVKIDS<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/worldscreen.com\/tvkids\/dubits-david-kleeman-wildbrains-anne-loi-on-the-metaverse\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Dubit\u2019s David Kleeman, WildBrain\u2019s Anne Loi on the Metaverse - TVKIDS\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Dubit\u2019s David Kleeman outlined how IP owners can extend their brands into the metaverse before catching up with WildBrain\u2019s Anne Loi on how that indie giant is exploring this new landscape at the TV Kids Summer Festival.\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/worldscreen.com\/tvkids\/dubits-david-kleeman-wildbrains-anne-loi-on-the-metaverse\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"TVKIDS\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2022-06-08T12:13:12+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:modified_time\" content=\"2022-07-08T15:21:01+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:image\" content=\"https:\/\/worldscreen.com\/tvkids\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/9\/2017\/07\/2022-06-07-metaverse.jpg\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:width\" content=\"600\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:height\" content=\"319\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:type\" content=\"image\/jpeg\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"Mansha Daswani\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:label1\" content=\"Written by\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data1\" content=\"Mansha Daswani\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:label2\" content=\"Est. reading time\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data2\" content=\"9 minutes\" \/>\n<script type=\"application\/ld+json\" class=\"yoast-schema-graph\">{\"@context\":\"https:\/\/schema.org\",\"@graph\":[{\"@type\":\"WebPage\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/worldscreen.com\/tvkids\/dubits-david-kleeman-wildbrains-anne-loi-on-the-metaverse\/\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/worldscreen.com\/tvkids\/dubits-david-kleeman-wildbrains-anne-loi-on-the-metaverse\/\",\"name\":\"Dubit\u2019s David Kleeman, WildBrain\u2019s Anne Loi on the Metaverse - TVKIDS\",\"isPartOf\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/worldscreen.com\/tvkids\/#website\"},\"datePublished\":\"2022-06-08T12:13:12+00:00\",\"dateModified\":\"2022-07-08T15:21:01+00:00\",\"author\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/worldscreen.com\/tvkids\/#\/schema\/person\/83da304c8bad8bfdb3edd7eb47cfe5ad\"},\"breadcrumb\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/worldscreen.com\/tvkids\/dubits-david-kleeman-wildbrains-anne-loi-on-the-metaverse\/#breadcrumb\"},\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\",\"potentialAction\":[{\"@type\":\"ReadAction\",\"target\":[\"https:\/\/worldscreen.com\/tvkids\/dubits-david-kleeman-wildbrains-anne-loi-on-the-metaverse\/\"]}]},{\"@type\":\"BreadcrumbList\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/worldscreen.com\/tvkids\/dubits-david-kleeman-wildbrains-anne-loi-on-the-metaverse\/#breadcrumb\",\"itemListElement\":[{\"@type\":\"ListItem\",\"position\":1,\"name\":\"Home\",\"item\":\"https:\/\/worldscreen.com\/tvkids\/\"},{\"@type\":\"ListItem\",\"position\":2,\"name\":\"Dubit\u2019s David Kleeman, WildBrain\u2019s Anne Loi on the Metaverse\"}]},{\"@type\":\"WebSite\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/worldscreen.com\/tvkids\/#website\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/worldscreen.com\/tvkids\/\",\"name\":\"TVKIDS\",\"description\":\"\",\"potentialAction\":[{\"@type\":\"SearchAction\",\"target\":{\"@type\":\"EntryPoint\",\"urlTemplate\":\"https:\/\/worldscreen.com\/tvkids\/?s={search_term_string}\"},\"query-input\":\"required name=search_term_string\"}],\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\"},{\"@type\":\"Person\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/worldscreen.com\/tvkids\/#\/schema\/person\/83da304c8bad8bfdb3edd7eb47cfe5ad\",\"name\":\"Mansha Daswani\",\"description\":\"Mansha Daswani is the editor-in-chief and associate publisher of World Screen. 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