Mumbai-based animation studio expands Wow Kidz YouTube platform and fortifies brand portfolio with new merchandising initiatives.
MUMBAI -- Taking the success of its multiple animation TV series further, Singapore and Mumbai-based Cosmos-Maya, Asia’s leading animation studio and the largest producer of original Indian animation content, has announced its business diversification initiatives for future growth.
Having carved its niche as a successful creator of IPs in the kids’ content space, the company is on a massive growth path and this is the first among many of its strategic growth initiatives. Beginning 2016, the company launched its digital video outfit, Wow Kidz, as a YouTube exclusive channel showcasing content from the company’s successful shows. With almost 160,000 active subscribers and around 200 million cumulative views since its launch, Wow Kidz is one of the fastest growing video platform for kids’ content driven purely through organic growth.
The company has a two-pronged approach to successfully tackle the digital revolution; first is to strengthen its presence on YouTube through its constantly growing existing content bank and produce high-quality original Indian animation for the recently launched & upcoming kids’ VOD platforms.
“Content consumption is changing dramatically in the digital era and the barriers of geographies are breaking,” said Cosmos-Maya CEO and producer Anish Mehta. “We at Cosmos-Maya are keen to produce good original content for the global VOD platforms that will bring in the best of Indian animation content for kids of Indian origin all over the world.”
The content ecosystem is evolving by the day and newer touch points are essential for consumers to engage with brands in order to build brand loyalty. Wow Kidz, both as the video platform & as a merchandising avenue are thereby the logical brand initiatives as part of the growth strategy of Cosmos-Maya. Taking a step by step growth approach, the company has started off the merchandising division with offline products sales inspired by their IPs and also online sales of their merchandise across all the leading e-commerce portals.
The next brand growth for Wow Kidz is a dedicated e-commerce platform, www.wowkidz.com, which will have a mega-launch in third quarter of 2016, coinciding with the Indian festival Diwali. “The idea behind these initiatives is to make the value proposition for our content more robust, and create more avenues to link the IP creation process with the IP monetization,” adds Mehta. “Kids want to buy the merchandise inspired by the shows that they consume and thus these initiatives have been taken in tandem with each other.”
Apart from the merchandise inspired from the Cosmos-Maya’s own IPs, including the successful shows like Motu Patlu, Shiva, Kisna, Eena Meena Deeka and ViR - The Robot Boy, Wow Kidz will also provide a line of merchandise products from some of the best animated shows on television. The third-party merchandise includes products inspired by many successful animation shows, including all-time classic animation shows Mickey Mouse, Tom & Jerry and Barbie as well as brands like Hello Kitty and Hotwheels, and shows popular with Indian kids like Chhota Bheem, Doraemon, Ben 10 and global superheroes like Batman, Superman, Spiderman and the Avengers.
As platforms evolve, the IP creation process also evolves. Cosmos-Maya leads the market in terms of creation of animated content with more than 25 half-hours of broadcast content created per month, which equals to almost one season a month between different shows. With a slew of television successes, five shows on air, three under production getting ready for a launch, rapidly growing global viewers on their YouTube platform, and a newly-launched dedicated e-commerce merchandising platform, Cosmos-Maya is all set to consolidate its leadership position in the kids’ content space.
Source: Cosmos-Maya
Formerly Editor-in-Chief of Animation World Network, Jennifer Wolfe has worked in the Media & Entertainment industry as a writer and PR professional since 2003.
