Clicks and Mortar – The New Retail Space

Wednesday 3rd July 2019, 11:10 - 12:10

Showroom Cinema 2

How has the merchandise and licensing industry adapted to digital disruption? With increasingly limited shelf space dominated by the big studios with even bigger budgets; toy companies now investing in their own content arms; plus the closure of specialist retailers such as Toys R Us, the traditional licensing models seem less and less sustainable. Yet we know that digital brings with it opportunity. E-commerce and D2C are, in many sectors, huge success stories, often due to a very different approach to marketing.  In this session we meet the brand owners who are doing it for themselves: bringing toy designers in-house, selling product via e-shops, creating new consumer product stories around today’s influencer talent, and developing their own direct-to-consumer platforms to reach a paying audience. Will this new frontier provide a much-needed gold rush or is the marketing and regulatory overhead just too prohibitive?