Think out of the box
to get more people to take notice of your product or service.
If you build an ecosystem around it that appeals to your target
audience, the customers will come. This was the message from Big BirdCreative Company (BBCC), an integrated media company based
in Taiwan which has built a name for itself in Taiwan and beyond
through offering a slew of content-related services for children
including education consulting, production & distribution, and
brand development.
Cathy Han, President, BBCC provided a
number of success stories during the Media Summit at the Asian
Festival of Children's Content 2014 in Singapore this June. “As
digital technology and globalisation trends continue, even end users
become content creators. To excel in this field and deliver content
to the end user, it is important to think about how to do it
effectively,” said Han.
The company raised the perception of
its partner Disney as a cut-rate content producer whose products are
sold at night markets into a premium brand whose bilingual books are
sold at almost twice the price of similar content from other
publishers, said Han. The key to the Disney transformation was
developing a professional performance troupe to
conduct community outreach as well as investing in
transforming Disney content into activities that could be conducted
in class.
“We linked what you read and what you
can do with the content,” Han explained. “We combined education
with entertainment to make it edutainment. Kids love our content as
it's a more interactive way to understand the content.”
BBCC also worked with McDonald's to
provide live entertainment that would bring customers back to the
restaurants again and again. The company trained McDonald's employees
to perform content from its partners, including locally
produced content as well as acts based on Disney and Marvel.
Some 20,000 events were
performed over two years in over 300 McDonald's restaurants in
the country. “Content is (no longer) something you read but
something you experience,” Han said.
BBCC's rights
to Old Master Q (老夫子,
OMQ), a fixture in Chinese comics in
Greater China for
over 50 years, was successfully turned into
revenue generation by transforming the public's impression
that it is too old fashioned. BBCC
animated the comics, some as interactive content, and leveraged the
50th anniversary of OMQ to
develop a successful exhibition tour built
around explaining Chinese humour.
“It's content
that people can experience, and
pay to go to. It's a very different
approach to just reading
the comics,” Han said.
A similar integrated
ecosystem was built around a simple traditional nursery rhyme about
building planes, Han shared. BBC created a
bilingual picture book with
a CD, sold e-book rights to
different countries, tied up with McDonald's on
publicity, and worked with a local TV channel to create animated
programmes around the theme.
When entering a new
market, a local partner is critical, Han added. “You can read
a lot about market analysis about the country but you can't learn
about the country unless you work with someone who really grew up
there, and understands the day to day changes, the business
needs. It's about operating in today's environment and not
about something you read two to three years
ago,” she advised.
