The Eternal Currency of the Playground

By Richard Pink, Managing Director, Pink Key Licensing

collectability with huge sums of money potentially changing hands for what appeared to be ostensibly a screensaver. It was extremely interesting having a number of discussions at Brand Licensing Europe last year where there was a significant change in people attitudes and a new insistence that the value in an NFT might actually lie in it having some sort of physical real-world version to accompany the virtual one. I think it’s too early to suggest that the whole thing was a set of ‘Emperor’s New Clothes’ as I do believe that NFTs are going to have a role in the developing Metaverse, though I’m not sure anyone yet knows what that role will be.

So, if we now believe that collectability isn’t (at least in the short term) going to move wholly into the virtual world, where is it going to go? This is where I wheel out my old adage that nothing ever really changes, it just transforms Dr Who like into the same thing in a different guise.

Every time I write one of these articles I seem to be harking back to my childhood or something else in my past. I guess the older I get the more there is to talk about of what I used to do!

However, in this instance it seems more relevant than ever. I’m sure we all remember what in common current parlance is called ‘playground currency’. It used to be anything that you could swap; a lot of the time it would involve trading of lunchbox biscuits or cheesy triangles, but in its most commercial form it would involve stickers, figurines or anything else you could collect. My own particular weapon of choice was the Esso World

Cup coin collection: the time it took me to complete the set seemed like a lifetime and involved haranguing my dad to fill up the car when it was completely unnecessary.

By far the most consistently visible manifestation is the football trading card with Panini and Merlin at the forefront, however, collectability has morphed over the last few years into places that no one even thought of a number of years ago and this has been for the most part driven by the licensing industry. Swapping and trading have been common practice online on multiple platforms now for many years and the emergence of NFTs was a natural progression into extremely high-end

Personally, I thought that there was limited collectability in the brands that Pink Key Licensing manages but I wasn’t factoring in the genius of companies like Zuru who have seen the enormous value of taking everyday items, shrinking them to miniature size, and creating waves of new playground currency through collections, special editions, spin offs and variations. As it turned out, having a selection of brands with multiple SKUs was exactly the kind of thing that they needed. Now, instead of hunting around for a Bobby Charlton coin, my equivalent 10 year-old of today is attempting to complete his set with a mini Peperami!

It goes further with MGA Entertainment’s LOL brand: they are now combining licenses with their own licensed product so that not only can an adult or child wear licensed clothing, their doll can also do it too, with a selection of apparel that you can collect for it. It is truly a piece of genius thinking. It all goes to prove, I think (and I hate myself for saying it) that some things just never change and there will always be an impulse to collect whether it is physical or virtual or a combination of both. Frankly, long may it continue!