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Amazon and a Mattel Unit Plan a ‘Content Hub’ Focusing on Children

Posted by Unknown on Sunday, June 1, 2014

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Media |Amazon and a Mattel Unit Plan a ‘Content Hub’ Focusing on Children



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“Fireman Sam” will be available on Amazon on Tuesday; related products will arrive in October. HIT Entertainment









LOS ANGELES — “Fireman Sam,” a cartoon aimed at preschoolers, has long been a hit overseas. Now Mattel and Amazon are teaming up to sell the yellow-hatted hero to American children — a potentially controversial experiment that, if successful, could create a new model for marrying television shows with related merchandise.


Amazon and Hit Entertainment, a division of Mattel, are creating an Amazon.com “content hub” that will — side by side — offer episodes of “Fireman Sam” and the opportunity to buy related toys, books, games, costumes, lunchboxes, T-shirts, hoses, hats, bags, footwear and bikes. Until now, Amazon has mostly kept the video streaming and retail sides of its business separate.



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“This allows us to test the boundaries of how a kids’ franchise can be activated,” said Sid Mathur, a Hit Entertainment vice president. “At the same time, it allows Amazon to transition from a place that simply fulfills consumer demand to one that also creates consumer demand.”


Fireman Sam episodes and themed merchandise will be sold exclusively at Amazon. About 75 episodes of the cartoon will be available by the end of the year, beginning with 13 on Tuesday; the related consumer products will arrive in October. “We’re always looking for ways to make parents’ lives easier,” Peter Larsen, an Amazon vice president, said in a statement.


The effort could agitate watchdog groups that monitor marketing to children.


“All of these kids’ shows are made with consumer products in mind, but there is usually no direct link between watching the episode and buying the backpack,” said James McQuivey, a Forrester Research analyst. “Does making it easier for consumers to act — what Amazon is all about — present a moral question in this case?”


If the cartoon were to run on a traditional television channel, Mr. McQuivey noted, Mattel would be barred from placing ads for Fireman Sam toys during the show or “adjacent” to it under the rules of the Children’s Advertising Review Unit, a division of the Council of Better Business Bureaus. The Federal Communications Commission also regulates advertising in children’s television.


But the Internet is murkier territory. And exactly what constitutes an ad on a shopping site like Amazon, anyway?


While Fireman Sam episodes and merchandise will be offered on the same page on Amazon’s primary site, Amazon said it expected children to access the cartoon through one of its walled services. Kindle FreeTime, for instance, is a subscription-based streaming service that gives children access to preselected shows but prevents them from visiting Amazon’s retail pages or the broader Web.


“Kindle FreeTime doesn’t allow kids to buy things and contains no ads,” Nate Glissmeyer, Amazon’s director of digital product management, Kids and Kindle Products, said in an interview. As for Amazon’s interest in Fireman Sam, Mr. Glissmeyer said, “He’s about being helpful, which I think is a great message for kids.”


The animated firefighter, introduced in Britain in 1985 and aimed at children ages 2 to 5, in recent years has appeared in a limited fashion on Sprout, an American cable channel for preschoolers now owned by NBCUniversal. But the character has never taken off in the United States, in part because Hit Entertainment has been focused on two bigger properties: Thomas & Friends and Bob the Builder.



Mattel, which bought Hit Entertainment in 2011 for $680 million, has made popularizing Fireman Sam a priority. Based in El Segundo, Calif., Mattel had a terrible holiday season last year, with sales at its core Fisher-Price preschool unit dropping 13 percent; Barbie also sputtered.


The toy company could have used a time-tested method to ignite interest in Fireman Sam: Sell the show to a TV channel, hope for a big audience and then use ratings to persuade retailers to devote shelf space to themed merchandise. If everything went like clockwork, it would have taken a year to get items in stores.


But eager to speed up the process — and mindful that children are increasingly consuming cartoons through streaming services and on-demand apps — Hit Entertainment instead approached Amazon. “Netflix would have brought reach to a certain set of consumers, but Amazon brought that and something else, namely a giant retail platform,” Mr. Mathur said.


Analysts say Amazon’s status as the world’s largest online retailer is emerging as a significant point of leverage in its battle with Netflix for video programming, at least in certain categories like children’s entertainment. (Nickelodeon left Netflix for Amazon last year as part of a deal valued at several hundred million dollars.)


“This is a sign of things to come,” Mr. McQuivey said of the Fireman Sam partnership, noting that Amazon could easily make similar merchandising deals with home decorating, cooking and health and fitness shows. “These programs are product placement from beginning to end,” he said. “Amazon is perhaps the only video distributor in the world that can let people immediately act on those impulses.”



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