Hiding In Plain Sight: Top Execs On Unlocking The Value In Legacy IP

As the TV world gathered at MIPCOM in Cannes to buy and sell shows, About Corporate Finance Investment Bank and Deadline brought together top execs and creatives to discuss how classic IP can be an engine for new global hits. A roundtable on the ACF yacht entitled Hiding in Plain Sight: The Untapped Value of Legacy IP gathered franchise creators, rights holders, buyers, analysts and tech experts to break down how classic content can be reactivated.

The message was that legacy IP has more than just nostalgia value; it can bring an audience, provide valuable data and be an asset that can generate revenue.

Parrot Analytics has calculated that TV shows based on existing IP have three-and-a-half times the demand of shows that are not. In movies that rises to four times the demand, so there is a clear business case to look to existing IP, notably when many buyers have constrained budgets and like the reassurance of built-in audience recognition for their green lights.

“We wanted a view of how people view global IP, from the people who create IP, who distribute IP and buy IP,” said Thomas Dey, CEO, ACF Investment Bank. “We thought it would be good to have a roundtable to discuss, in today’s world, what are the things that concern you? How do we make IP successful? What are the things that interest you, and what are the things that we need to discuss?”

Bob The Brand Builder

Keith Chapman said that creating a new preschool hit is harder than winning the lottery – and yet he has had the winning ticket a few times. Chapman created Bob the Builder and, over a quarter of a century since Bob first put on his toolbelt, a new movie is in the works. He also created PAW Patrol, the rescue dogs series for kids that will soon hit 800 episodes on TV. It has spawned movies that have grossed over $500M at the box office and generated double-digit billions of dollars in merch sales.

Chapman is by any standard a creative powerhouse and said the first thought should be about building a whole brand and not just a TV show. “That comes from my background working in advertising on brands, and then working with Jim Henson, the Muppets and all those amazing global brands that Jim created,” he said.

“I got to know and understand the merchandising angle from the very first stage and how important that was. Everything I do is geared towards that because I realize that you can’t make series two without it. You can’t just rely on an investor to keep coming up with money or gap financing.”

“It’s all about how you make something relevant again and not feel dusty, because it’s cool to say, ‘The kidults and the adults want it,’ but that doesn’t mean your kid is going to want it,” said Stephanie Betts, Chief Content Officer at WildBrain, which has a raft of classic brands including Strawberry Shortcake, Inspector Gadget, Degrassi and Yo Gabba Gabba!

WildBrain acquired an 80% stake in Peanuts in 2017 and later sold its remaining 41% stake to Sony. It still makes the Peanuts shows on Apple TV. “When we first started approaching what we would do with Peanuts, when we owned it, it was how do we make it not your grandmother’s Snoopy? How do we have an entry point first with kids.”

Shelley Macintyre is CEO, Brands & Licensing at BBC Studios, which is home to IP including BBC Earth, Top Gear and Doctor Who. While the Doctor always regenerates, the sci-fi series is over 60-years-old and needs careful management to sustain fandom between TV outings.

There is the digital series The Whoniverse Show on YouTube and multiplatform project Doctor Who: Circuit Breaker. “It’s finding genuine ways to continue the stories in order to, when you bring back a show, the fandoms are there to tune in immediately,” Macintyre said.

“Fandoms can smell when something is authentic and when it’s dialed in. If you’re just slapping a show name on a T-shirt because it’s going to sell something, that might be okay for a year or two, but it’s not going to build an evergreen franchise.”

There is evergreen IP in reality and unscripted catalogs in the same way as there is in film and TV drama libraries. In unscripted TV, Banijay Entertainment has some of the most enduring brands out there. Its library has swollen to over 265,000 hours since merging with All3Media, with All3Media shows including The Traitors added to a lineup that already included Big Brother, MasterChef and Survivor. Banijay labels its juggernaut shows ‘superbrands’.

“We are building lots of new formats, and original new IP is a really important part of our growth strategy,” said Lucas Green, Chief Content Officer, Operations at Banijay. “But people also like the comfort of the formats that they know and love, and they come back to them. It’s much easier to expand IP into live events, into sport, into merch if it’s a brand that people know already. Investment in IP is a no-brainer because these are often just the best, most simple ideas in their genre.”

B2C2B: YouTube As Fandom Multiplier

The power of social platforms and YouTube to reignite and connect with fandoms was a recurring roundtable theme.

European animation studio Animaj has reimagined classic kids brands Pocoyo and Maya the Bee. It used YouTube to build Pocoyo to where it attracts over a billion views a month. “You start with the audience first; you build a fandom on YouTube, and when the audience is big enough, then you go back to the broadcasters and the streamers, it’s B2C2B,” said Sixte de Vauplane, Animaj CEO.

“You shift from selling a show to selling an audience, which is far more valuable,” he added. “If you’re able to start big on YouTube, build the audience from there, then you are able to go back to the traditional flywheel, to the licensing, to the content sales. You’re reversing into those traditional windows, but with the bargaining power.”

Going B2C and building an audience that can then be monetized and sold to buyers requires investment, turning the model on its head for many TV producers.

“One question that keeps coming up in conversations that I’m having when you’re talking about the B2C world and selling audiences rather than selling content is how does that start?,” said Nigel Warner, CEO of PACT, the influential UK indie producers association. “If nobody’s paying you to make the stuff in the first place, and you’ve got to make it in order to build the audience and then go back to broadcasters, how do you get it made and how do you get the investors in the first place, particularly for the more expensive content?”

For producers wanting to work with classic IP, another challenge is getting hold of it in a competitive market. Lion Forge Entertainment secured ‘Chicka Chicka Boom Boom’, the Simon & Schuster kids picture book by Bill Martin, Jr. and John Archambault. A beloved book, it has never existed as a TV show with characters and a narrative. “We packaged up what we thought was a lovely creative approach to this classic IP, creating story, creating characters and sold it to Nickelodeon,” said Stephanie Sperber, the former Universal Studios and Imagine Entertainment exec who is now President and Chief Creative Officer at Lion Forge.

The ‘Chicka Chicka Boom Boom’ adaptation will start as shortform on YouTube and if it clicks with audiences, it could become a TV series.

In the lit-to-screen world, Sperber adds that a big-name author can effectively become the IP, offering name recognition that opens doors with buyers. “We have an R.L. Stine book called ‘Monster Bureau’. He is a brand, and he matters because his books have worked in the past,” Sperber said.

Measures Of Success

Going deeper than ratings or viewing time is key to identifying classic IP that is ripe for relaunch or reinvention. Parrot Analytics analyzes engagement around IP, which can help spot the legacy brands that have the most potential.

Jaime Otero, VP Partnerships at the analytics firm, said: “We measure what people search for, social media interaction, social video and actual consumption. We also look at the content creation around content that already exists. That’s very important because it helps you also identify diamonds in the rough, as well as the titles that might have solid ratings, but not necessarily have those legs.”

Combining viewership stats, fandom measurement and analysis of whether something will travel is vital, Otero explained. The likes of Bluey and Money Heist server as good examples. “They were okay performers initially from a linear perspective in their local markets, but then they started generating this deep fandom and travelability outside of those borders.”

The Economics Of Legacy IP

ACF Investment Bank, meanwhile, is 25 years old and has advised on some of the most significant IP and content transactions of recent times in the entertainment business. These include the sale of The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit IP to Embracer, Paddington Bear IP to StudioCanal and GKIDS to TOHO.

“We have consistently demonstrated that dormant or undervalued IP, when properly structured and positioned, can unlock extraordinary value for its owners,” Dey said, adding that ACF’s job is to identify where the value lies, find the right home for it and get a deal done.

“The roundtable we hosted in Cannes with Deadline was a natural extension of that work. The conversation around legacy IP has never been more urgent. Audiences want trusted brands, platforms need proven content and rights holders are beginning to understand what their catalogs are truly worth.”

Marc Allen, Founding Partner at Easttree Media, explained one way in which IP owners can realize the value locked in classic IP. Easttree, which is backed by funds managed by BlackRock, acquires passive profit participations, in whole or in part, for an upfront payment. That allows rights owners to unlock cash from income streams that may continue for decades.

“We’re there to look at and price the content and we’ll give you a lump sum,” Allen said. “In terms of dormant IP, it is probably making money, but you may be surprised to find out how much it’s worth.”

Easttree moves stealthily and does not discuss which IP and IP owners it is working with, but it is sinking significant sums into film and TV. “We are finance, and we are data-driven … but we love our content and we’re involved with some of the most amazing brands,” Allen said.

AI can also monetize library content. One of the AI players front and center at MIPCOM was Versos AI, which licenses video data for AI training.

Chris Keevill, co-founder and CEO, said: “Our side is helping studios monetize their dormant assets for AI training; it’s unlocking value in those NAS drives and cold drives and whatever’s held in storage and preparing raw video into a trainable dataset. And then we expose it to all the big labs, who are hungry to get at it.”

Versos will work with big and small libraries, and an increasing range of footage has value when it comes to training AI models. “Increasingly, [the buyers] want multicam views, which is good for the studios,” Keevill said. “We’re now going into the rough cuts and the edit suite to find the 16 takes from eight cameras on the same subject.”