Licensing industry veterans Trudi Hayward and Jean-Philippe Randisi have joined forces to form a new children’s entertainment support company, bRAND-WARD.
Hayward has many years of consumer products experience, across brand and entertainment properties, previously working for Beanstalk Europe, CPLG, Entertainment Rights, Viacom — where she set up the U.K. Nickelodeon consumer products business and then later looked after all pan-European activities — to ITV, where she was in charge of Global Consumer Products.
Randisi, after several years at Disney, ran Saban Consumer Products Europe, then set up with Hayward the consumer products business of Viacom in Europe, before taking over International. He then joined ITV, heading up Consumer Products, Home Entertainment and International Digital, and kids content production. More recently, he was CEO of Zodiak Kids, the production and distribution division of children’s content at Banijay Group with studios in the U.K. and France.
bRAND-WARD’s mission is to help IP owners/creators in the kids’ entertainment business grow outside of their core business and monetize their IP globally. IP development is key to long-term value creation, and 360-degree consumer reach is a condition to IP success in today’s environment.
bRAND-WARD will provide support across multiple areas:
– Content: sourcing of IP, content strategy, production strategy, production financing, co-production.
– Brand development: market positioning, marketing strategy and plans, digital exposure, marketing and creative assets development
– Sales: TV/digital strategy, consumer products strategy, blending (merging broadcast and CP strategies into one consistent market approach to maximize success), appointment and management of distributors and agents.
bRAND-WARD is currently working with the kids’ division of the Chinese conglomerate Hengxin Shambala, and Paris based Cyber Group Studios, one of the fastest growing kids content producers in Europe.
Hayward comments, “I am delighted to be working with Jean-Philippe again and I suspect it will be no surprise to the industry that we have joined forces again to offer our clients the best strategy across content and monetisation, globally!’
“With my content and media expertise and Trudi’s consumer products and local market knowledge of the retail nuances we hope that partners will find our services hugely beneficial when creating and rolling out new IP,” added Randisi.
