TOTAL LICENSING
In his latest column, Gary Pope, co-founder and CEO, Kids Industries, talks about the enduring value of children’s IP
2022... A mammoth year for the licensing world Intellectual Property (IP) is a funny old thing. It kind of sounds like it actually only exists in our minds and I suppose, to a degree that’s true. But the real value of a children’s IP is in how much they love it, and well, how they ask their adults to spend on it. IPs exist because they fire the imaginations of our children.They model good behaviours, they help them understand the world around them and perhaps most importantly, they make children happy. The stories that drive the licensing industry are special. They are part of
patience and virtue and any number of other important things that we humans should understand to make the most of life. These days, when this approach is used in the preschool content, we call it ‘soft learning’.
the fabric of childhood and whilst consumer products and QSR partnerships are relatively recent additions, the essence of why we have them and what they do has been the same for time immemorial. The first children’s stories were of course those told in the oral tradition - passed from generation to generation as a way of inspiring, teaching and guiding the next generation. A very different type of influencer to those that kids aspire to today. Aesop is credited with some of the first stories for children that were put down on papyrus; 725 of them that enabled children (and general population for that matter) to share an understanding of right and wrong,
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It wasn’t until the 1600s that the concept of childhood really started to take shape - before that children were really just thought of as miniature adults. It was with this realisation that children’s publishing - the first IPs - began to emerge. Largely very difficult to access, these books remained a tough read until John Newby published A
