TOTAL LICENSING
Interview: Zinkia Victor M. López, Managing Director, Zinkia Entertainment, sat down with Total Licensing to discuss Pocoyo’s 20th anniversary, new IP and plans for the future.
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Can you outline some of the plans for the 20th anniversary of Pocoyo? The 20th anniversary of Pocoyo will be marked by the evolution of the brand, to be revealed in the new season, which is already the fifth. This rebranding also touches on Zinkia’s corporate brand, which, in this way, will mark a turning point. We would love to make our plans public, but if we do, we would lose the surprise effect. Pocoyo is going to have intense activity, from super-disruptive digital initiatives to more traditional formats, such as music festivals, meet & greets or the figure of Pocoyo in the Wax Museum in Madrid, which has already been recently opened. And give us some history to how Pocoyo started out… Pocoyo comes up from the desire to turn our vocation, something that amused us, into our way of earning a living.The need to transform ourselves and our environment into something better. If you add to that excitement, tons of talent, a young team, terribly inexperienced, but with a crazy desire to do different things, the result is Pocoyó. A content that shook the industry by taking a “cartoon” animation style to 3D, taking simplicity as a virtue, putting technology at the service of the stories, something that sadly, seemed to be less valued in CGI. You have some great news around the brand including signings with Alexa and in Mexico. What’s next for Pocoyo? Pocoyo is currently undergoing a
period of intense activity. In recent months, its growth has been reinforced with the signing of major alliances with HBO Max and Cartoon Network, Disney+ and Netflix, among many others. It has also added licensees, with the incorporation of large companies such as Penguin Random House. In terms of content production, in 2023 we will start the fifth season of the series and we have several special content collaboration projects. How has Zinkia evolved over the years? In recent years Zinkia has undergone a huge transformation, from such apparently unimportant aspects as changing our office after 18 years or the corporate identity; to other fundamental aspects such as buying the Canary Islands production company KOYI and its intellectual property assets: Bumpy, which will start production at the beginning of 2023, GhostBros, which will be presented at the next Kidscreen. We have also developed a new IP such as Yanco, Dina and the Dinosaurs, after 15 years without tackling any new project. With Pocoyo, in the last three years we have produced more original content than in the previous 15 years, its international presence has been multiplied and YouTube channels have grown from 11 million subscribers in 2019 to close to 40 million in 2022, going from 1.8 billion videos watched to more than 6.5 billion. The new year is a new starting point. And can you outline the whole 360 offering of the company? Our content continues to have the aspiration of becoming a brand, a franchise that reaches its target audience wherever it is: TV channels, platforms, YouTube, social networks, Apps, video games. At Zinkia we have a core team capable of producing or leading each of these kind of projects, keeping the brand values and adapting the content to the medium, working with transmedia narratives and offering original content that inspires children and families. In terms of distribution, we manage our YouTube channels, we manage
social networks in coordination with licensing agents in each territory, we have a Fast channel in testing in Spain, an OTT channel in the USA. In addition to, of course, selling our content to TV channels and platforms around the world, we started to manage our means of distribution, establishing a dialogue with our audiences and analysing statistical data that gives us a clue as to where we are getting it right and where we are getting it wrong. In terms of licensing, this is reflected in something that has marked all our projects, where toymakers and licensing agents have always contributed their vision from very early stages. Which areas of licensing are you specifically focusing on at the moment? Each content means a target audience and the combination of both, content and audience, has a specific licensing strategy. Toys continue to be key in preschool content, in terms of turnover, retail presence and marketing investment. Publishing continues to be another of the pillars of licensing. Bringing reading closer to children and families, bringing your brand into the home through a book is very enriching and improves parents’ perception of your content. Textiles understood as part of fashion, hygiene products, of course, music and why not art or technology. And what areas do you think, in general, will be the real growth areas? The universe of NFT’s makes sense to us if we treat it as digital art. In other words, if it is unique, if it is rare, if it is original, if it has value in itself. We don’t believe in collections of thousands of NFTS’s of speculative value or false added value, we are a bit allergic to that. We love live events, where the technology makes them unique, cinema films where you have to leave the mobile phones on and it offers a completely different experience... Maybe we just like to play, invent and do things a bit differently.