Angry Birds creators “Rovio and the Moomins have opened people’s eyes – but they still don’t understand what a broad and profitable field this is,” says Tuomo Karvonen. He is producer at the Finnish Association of Agents and Managers in Creative Industries (Agma), which hosts a seminar on intellectual property licensing in Helsinki on Thursday.
“It’s not just piddly stuff or limited to products for kids, but rather extends into all sectors of industry and business. Internationally, the sale of licensing rights is already worth billions of dollars,” notes Karvonen.
Besides Tove Jansson’s Moomintrolls, characters from another Finnish author-illustrator are also big business. The appealing animals of Mauri Kunnas’s Doghill series have long been reproduced on textiles, toys, pens, games and mugs.
Theme park exceeds target
Kunnas has sold the rights to produce such merchandise to the Martinex company, based in Raisio, south-west Finland. But he has retained the right to inspect and approve – or reject – each item himself.
And he retains ownership of all his characters and stories, which include the internationally-popular Santa Claus and Finnish Elves books. Kunnas, now 63, has had help from lawyers since the early days of his international career in the early 1980s.
“I’ve kept everything relatively firmly in my own hands,” says Kunnas. “It’s been easy in a way, because I’ve always been relatively popular and my sales figures have been quite large.”
Last year, some 300,000 copies of Kunnas’s books were sold. His one-man company Doghill Productions had a turnover of more than a million euros – about half of that from spinoff products.
The latest expansion of his empire is Doghill Park at the Särkänniemi amusement park in Tampere, which opened last spring.
The success of this section of Särkänniemi has exceeded the theme park operators’ high expectations, says CEO Miikka Seppälä. After a crowded first summer, the park re-opened on weekends from the beginning of December through Epiphany, he says.
“Our target was to attract 5,000 visitors, but we got 17,000. Doghill’s rustic, romantic nineteenth-century world is a wonderful licensing area for an amusement park," says Seppälä.
Keep a cool head
So what advice does Kunnas have for creative people negotiating to license their intellectual property?
Keep a cool head, and if you don’t understand something, say so – and take the time to find out about it before signing anything. Also, stick to short contracts that you can get out of if a deal doesn’t work out, he advises.
He sees the current situation as uncertain – yet potentially lucrative for such deals, with merchandising becoming ever more important.
“Right now, nobody knows which way this business is heading. What kind of books will there be in the future – or will there be any at all? Which product is more profitable, a book or a game? Now the publishers want their contracts to include all kinds of rights, and magazine publishers want all rights until the end of the world. And that’s crappy,” concludes Kunnas.
