Toy Tuesday: Is Nukotoys the next wave in gaming?

Players in the colliding worlds of kids’ products and entertainment seem to be constantly finding new ways to enhance kids’ interaction with brands, leading to the emergence of completely new play patterns. An interesting example is that of Nukotoys, a startup company that’s trying to apply “Silicon Valley models” to its business with rapid prototyping, interactive technology, nimbleness, financial efficiency, and scalability.

The company is planning to make game cards with embedded chips, containing skills or tools that help players with their game. It’s an excellent integration of the play patterns that we see in both computer games and in trading card games. The social media like integration adds another dimension to the play pattern.

In games from Nukotoys, special trading cards will give kids additional powers or skills that they will be able to utilize in-world, as well as trade those cards with real-world friends, who will automatically become part of their in-world social networks.

Richard Garfield, who developed Magic: The Gathering for Wizards of the Coast, is credited with being the creator of the hugely successful genre of trading cards. He is designing the overarching card system for Nukotoys.

During the time I spent at Wizards of the Coast, we often speculated about what would be the next “wave” in gaming, with role playing games (Dungeons & Dragons), miniatures (Warhammer), and trading card games (Magic: The Gathering, Pokémon) being the first waves. With an intriguing concept and extensive cross platform integration, perhaps Nukotoys’ game system will be the next wave.

Read more about Nukotoys here.

Tasty Furniture? Lemon Scented Breakfast?

I'm all for developing line looks for packaging that are "on brand", but sometimes striving for consistency to achieve the same look in branded packaging isn't a good idea. I think Walmart ought to give a little more thought to how they approach packaging for their Great Value brand before someone makes their morning pancakes with furniture polish.

Franklin, Barbie, and Calliou - LIVE!

Live entertainment for kids' brands is often a key component of a solid marketing strategy. For leading brands, live shows in theaters and malls are a great source of revenue. For other brands, live shows can heighten awareness and appeal among kids and their parents.

By coincidence, I have worked closely on all the brands featured in ad in this weekend's Toronto Star for Toronto's Sony Centre for the Performing Arts. I started my career in the toy industry working on Barbie branded products. Franklin the Turtle was every kids' best friend when I worked at Nelvana for four years, and it was like he became my friend too. It appears that the Franklin live show is similar (identical?) to the "Franklin and the Green Knight" program that I worked on at Nelvana. Finally, I got to know Caillou as master toy licensee when I was Marketing Director at Irwin Toy.

It's nice to see how these classic brands continue to entertain kids and gratifying to know that I played a part.

Sesame Street's Grover as "The Old Spice Guy"

As someone who works in marketing and entertainment, I've also thought that one of the greatest honors is to be parodied on Sesame Street. An even bigger achievement is to have Sesame Street parodying a parody, which is exactly what they've done with Grover's take on the Old Spice Guy:

Toy Tuesday: Fill in the Spot with Lego

This cute video from Lego uses clever visual devices to show how you can build anything from Lego.

Build Anything from Studiocanoe on Vimeo.

Just the Right Senses of Humor and Propriety

The Toronto Star’s current series on Canadian culture offers a fascinating overview of kids’ TV shows that are produced in Canada.

They quote many industry experts, including Cookie Jar’s Michael Hirsh, the BBC’s Adrian Mills, and Caroline Fortier from The Alliance for Children and Television.

The Star correctly points out that Canadian kids’ programming has wide appeal around the world because it seems to have just the right sense of humor and just the right sense of propriety:

• We have a good sense of what is acceptable and what is not acceptable.
• Canadians have different values. We are a cross between the European and the American.
• Canadian kids’ shows score low on violence and very high on informal education, happy characters and scenes depicting social relationships, ecological behaviour and cultural activities.
• We have shared social and cultural values --a passion and deep-rooted respect for the audience.
• Canadian producers can bring an ‘American’ sensibility to a program — particularly in animation or live-action drama for older kids — but in a toned-down, safer kind of way which some consider more palatable than the undiluted product.

Children’s television in general, and animation in particular, is a real Canadian forte, and I feel privileged to work with several Canadian companies who bring great entertainment to kids around the world.

Check out the full article in The Star here.

Travel Thursday: Search by "Agony"

A new search engine for flights callled Hipmunk is online now.

According to Lifehacker,

Web site Hipmunk re-imagines flight search, translating the information you're most interested in to a user-friendly chart of possible flights.

Most popular flight search engines are cluttered, full of text, and difficult to understand at a glance. Hipmunk takes the most important flight information you'd get at any flight search engine—travel time, layovers, price—and organizes it into an actually useful visual (rather than all-text) interface. (It's sort of like a Gantt chart for flights.) Click on any flight for a closer look at the full details.

You can sort results by price, number of stops, departure/arrival time, and duration, but you also get an extra search category called agony, a combined function of price, duration, and number of stops—basically the total agony you'll experience in your butt and your savings.

I love the idea of searching by "agony," and will definitely use this website. On the downside, though, they don't seem to include flights for American Airlines, which is often my preferred airline.