reveries.com - kenn viselman

DECEMBER 1998

Teletubbies is climbing in the ratings It's flying up there. It's now one of the top three children's shows on television in America. Kenn Viselman, the marketing mind behind the mania, is amazed.

"We got such flack with Teletubbies," he sighs. "The press attacked it on so many levels."

It didn't matter, though, because the pre-school set went absolutely "eh-oh" over Tinky-Winky, Laa-Laa, Dipsy and Po. The Teletubbies are projected to sell some $2 billion in merchandise within the next year. Their newly-released video already is more popular than, uh, Barney.

It's only the adults -- and even slightly older kids -- who sometimes seem befuddled by all the fuss. Try watching the show sometime (it's on PBS) and see what you think. Teletubbies barely speak. They utter a few syllables here and there. They fall down. They do it again. And again. They giggle. They give each other "big hugs." They dance. They take for-freaking-ever just to say "bye-bye."

Teletubbies are undeniably cute and funny. But you've got to watch the show through the eyes of a two-year-old if you hope to understand what it's all about.

Or, spend some quality time with 37-year-old Kenn Viselman, whose young company, New York- based itsy bitsy Entertainment Company (no typos, it's mixed case), drives the U.S. marketing effort behind Teletubbies. Kenn is committed not just to making the U.K.-imported Teletubbies a major U.S. licensing property. His idea is to open up a whole new genre of entertainment for the itsy-bitsyest consumers.

Kenn explains his elan in metaphor, recalling a big willow tree that stood in his front yard when he was growing up. "There was something about the tree in that I always felt safe there. I don't feel that in today's world parents have a "willow tree" for their kids, where they know there's no violence, no negativity, no sexual promiscuity, no aggressive behavior. It's just a loving, lovable place. Disney, Warner Brothers -- they make great stuff. But it's not for the youngest viewer."

In a hushed, emotionally-charged voice, Kenn relays that his entire approach to marketing to kids -- indeed his life -- was changed by one little, autistic boy. At age five, the child's first words, "choo-choo," were sparked by his love for Thomas the Tank Engine, a property Kenn rejuvinated into a $1 billion business prior to founding itsy bitsy three years ago. He keeps a fading Polaroid photo of the boy wearing a Thomas T-shirt tacked on his wall.

"He had this shirt on for six straight days. He refused to take it off. He bathed in it, slept in it, everything. Right? My whole thing had been to make a lot of money in the entertainment industry and be done with it. Suddenly, I realized I was also shaping children's lives."

Just in case you were wondering, Kenn Viselman started spelling his first name with two "n's" because his mother, while heavily sedated following major surgery, had a premonition he'd be famous. She told her young son that the extra "n" (like Barbra Streisand's missing "a") would afford him greater star power. "She still doesn't remember saying it," he chuckles. "It's kind of like a joke between us."

Kenn may not yet be the Barbra of marketing, exactly. But he surely is on a stellar trajectory, propelled by that place "over the hills and far away," the littlest kids know -- and undeniably love -- as Teletubbyland.

One of the first things I heard about Teletubbies was that it was mildly subversive.

Really?

Yeah. Why would anyone say that?

Nobody can believe anything is really good for them. It's always, "ah, there's got to be something wrong with this, I'm sure of it." We look for the bad in everything now, which is a real shame. We've become very cynical as a nation.

There's this nonsensical scandal -- scandal's too strong a word -- with Teletubbies where they're suggesting that Po says an F-word, a derogatory of homosexuals. It's like -- you know what -- that's a great idea! Let's take the best-selling toy in America and the second-largest toymaker in the world, put PBS and my company in the mix, and let's really screw it up. Let's show people how arrogant we are by throwing porno into the middle of it.

There is the thing with Tinky-Winky, a male character who carries a handbag.

Right. But what's important to us with this series -- both me and moreso with Anne Wood and Andy Davenport of Ragdoll Productions who created it -- is that it is honest. Anne and Andy observed children -- the way they acted, the way they talked, interacted -- what they do in certain situations. They created the series based on those observations.

It wasn't like the two of them sat around in some office and thought, "oh, I know, let's have them do such-and-such." They watched children do it. Anne and Andy just put it together based on what the kids themselves created.

How did you first hear about Teletubbies?

Teletubbies wasn't a series yet when I first started working with Anne. She and I were working on Tots TV, another PBS series. Itsy bitsy represents all of Anne's work here in the Americas. Anne came to New York and said she was working on this new series. She said, "It's TV for the youngest television viewer."

Before there was Teletubbies, there was no television that was age appropriate for the youngest viewer. Sesame Street's a great show, Barney's a great show, Arthur's a great show. But they aren't age appropriate for children as young as one.

Parents who choose to give their child television are putting them in front of the TV at younger and younger ages. If they're going to give their youngest children television, Teletubbies gives parents an age-appropriate choice.

Did Teletubbies change much from the U.K. to the U.S.?

The show from the U.K. to the U.S. changed a lot, but I need to explain the foundation of that. Anne and I did a deal in the U.S. before the show went on the air, before she did her deal with the BBC. If anything, it was really an American show that went on the U.K. first, but we don't present it that way.

Teletubbies was designed to be the first multinational television show. That's why there's this little device of the windows in the Teletubbies' bellies, where sometimes you see videos of English children, while sometimes they're American. Anne originally thought maybe she could also bring in some children from Denmark or Japan, to be able to show children in the Americas different cultures from around the world in those windows.

That's changed. In the U.K., it's just British children. We re-shot some for America, and we re-shot some by using children in other territories. On the U.S. show, the narrators are all American versus British. The only thing we didn't change from the U.K. to the U.S. was the Teletubbies themselves, and their language. We left that intact.

Do you have a favorite Teletubby?

Which of your children do you love better? Each one of the Teletubbies is different. I think a lot depends on my mood on different days. I do find things in each of them that I like that are part of my personality.

I like La-La's energy. I love the way she dances. I smile every time I see a picture of her because her feet are inverted or her head's tilted or she's got this funny tutu on. I like Po's innocence. Dipsy's much more kind of "out there." He's a lot funkier. You know when he responds it's going to be something kind of funky.

I am thinking of adopting a child soon. I have a couple of puppies. One man, two dogs and a baby. We could make a movie.

I like Tinky-Winky because he's very down-to-earth. He's very loving and kind and simple. Tinky Winky is surprisingly, wildly popular in this country. I think it's because a lot of kids like purple in America. They just like the color. He's really extraordinarily popular and we've kind of had to re-arrange some product mixes from our original idea of how they would sell by character.

But they're all mine and I have to make sure they all get equal sunlight, so to speak.

How big can Teletubbies get before they get bad?

Well, the bigger you are, the bigger target you are. So, there are a lot of people looking at it as a target right now. I'm not sure that it's going to get bad. It may. Who knows?

Right now, we've licensed a number of companies, but only a handful of them have product out. Of that handful, only a few of them are in broad distribution. The majority of them are in specialty stores. It's been pretty narrow that way. We do a lot of business on a very limited number of SKUs.

I think right now we're still in a very positive light. We're pretty conscious about only making products that caregivers ask for, that we roll the product out in a very reasonable way. I think we have a long way to go before people say, "ugh, don't show me another one of those Teletubby things."

How did you come up with the name itsy bitsy?

Well, I could lie to you, because that's what we tend to do here! At this particular juncture, this is when I lie! But I won't. As a kid, I loved the song, "The Itsy Bitsy Teeny Weeny Polka Dot Bikini." At one point it was going to be "the itsy bitsy teeny weeny entertainment company." But I just imagined someone answering the phone, "Hello, this is the itsy bitsy teeny weeny entertainment company this is Suzie speaking can I help you?" So we kind of backed into the itsy bitsy Entertainment Company.

But really it's important to me to remember we're dealing with fragile, itsy bitsy little kids. It keeps it so that every day we're reminded that we do stuff for little kids.

We've also now opened a teeny weeny Production Company, and we're about to open polka dot bikini Entertainment. We're opening corporate offices in L.A. and the door is going to say "the itsy bitsy teeny weeny polka dot bikini Entertainment Group." So, at the end of the day, we'll have the whole thing.

Before itsy bitsy, before Teletubbies, you made your name by bringing Thomas the Tank Engine back from the dead. What did you learn from that experience that you've applied since?

We kind of re-shaped and re-defined the way licensing was done. It wasn't because I was particularly smart, but because every other door was closed, every window was closed. You could get in through the wine cellar and that was it.
The department stores didn't want anything to do with Thomas the Tank. The mass retailers didn't, because the product had just bombed. So the specialty retailers, the mom-and-pop ones, said "okay, I'll bring in six." So we had to find, you know, 150,000 mom-and-pop stores to buy six each before we could have any kind of a business.

Suddenly, the show started airing more frequently, and the products that were out there were really good. Suddenly, the little mini-chains, that have six or eight stores, started to buy. Then the stores that had fifteen. Pretty soon the mass retailers were begging us to have this product again. But that doesn't happen. In licensing, if you fail, you're done.

It sounds a lot like what Ty, Inc. did intentionally with the Beanie Babies, as a strategy.

They got that strategy, I would argue, because of the success of Thomas the Tank Engine. It was a very, very rare thing to do because usually you've got a character with a limited life cycle. So you get the product as far out as you can as fast as you can -- and as broad as you can.

I don't subscribe to that -- not for children -- because if you have a pre-school project, that project should last forever. It's basic, it's wholesome, it's quality. It's not an event license, where you've got Godzilla coming and going. This was a PBS series, it had a multi-year commitment. There was no likelihood that it was leaving the air anytime soon. I knew that the only thing I had was time, so I took a slow approach.

What about your other properties, other than Teletubbies?

Anne Wood, who created Teletubbies, also created another show called Tots TV. It was the first show we put on the air. Tots is a very special show for me personally, because I think we live in a world that has little tolerance. I think we have to teach kids when they're really young about best friends -- about friendship in general -- that it's not about skin color or accents or races. It's about how we need each other.

The press have not caught onto Tots TV. They find one of the show's characters, Terry, annoying, because she doesn't speak English. They don't know what she's saying and they don't try to understand it.

That sounds like Teletubbies in a way.

It is. Tots TV is Teletubbies but for an older audience. It's the same basic principles about children being the catalyst.

It's about children going on the adventures, about surprises and funny things. It's a very loving, touching show. Parents like it. It's doing really well.

Noddy?

Noddy's on PBS as a weekly. Noddy himself is a little wooden toy who lives in toyland. All his friends are toys. He drives the town taxi, which is this little yellow car. His best girlfriend is a teddy bear. There's Ralph the monkey and this whole slew of very fun toy characters. Grandpa Noah watches over the toys while their parents are at work. It's a coming-of-age story for three year olds. It has great moral lessons about not judging a book by its cover and things like that.

And you're launching a new series?

Right, next year. We haven't told anybody yet about this show, other than it's called the Animal - Shelf. It's about these five soft toys who live on a shelf in Timo

thy's bedroom. The show is lovely. When Timothy's not around, these soft toys come to life and go on adventures. It's done in model animation. As they say now, I think model animation is "the bomb." It's it. I think that kids love it because it's three dimensional and it's much easier for you to imagine that they're real.

You never see Timothy, you just see his shadow on the wall. And you see these five animals who need each other to survive. They hang out, they take care of each other. But there's no presenter who gets in the way of it all, in any of these shows. You just find yourself immersed in their world. You just go there and experience it.

Any other interesting new projects on the horizon?

We have a brand we're developing in-house, which is very exciting for us. It's three words: Just Like Dad's. That's all it is. I love these words. Before there were action figures, Dad was a child's first hero. The concept of what makes up a family is different than it was 25 years ago, but every child, at some point in time, worships his or her Dad. Every Dad wants his child to worship him.

We got the idea we could create a wholesome brand that just supported the idea of you and your child being able to wear the same outfit. Or Dad being part of his kid's Halloween costume. Or your child could carry a mini briefcase, dress up and role-play. We have thousands of ideas of things we might do, just like that. Cal Ripkin has just signed on as our spokesperson for Just Like Dad's. We have two feature films planned and two television shows in pre-production -- one for daytime children and one for primetime -- a primetime animated soap opera.

How do you explain your success?

I'm very dynamic when you meet me. No -- I'm only kidding! I don't know how to explain it. I do believe in destiny. I believe I'm doing what I'm supposed to be doing.

I never said, "Oh, my God, I want to work on children's things." I don't have children, and I don't necessarily expect to have children. I don't necessarily have a lot of compassion for people who do have children. You know, they're always screaming and ruining my meal or my movie. I never thought this was going to be my life's work.

I come in every day to work and I laugh. We have forty-two employees now. I had eleven a year ago. It's hysterical to me. It's because Disney and Warner Brothers don't focus on pre-school stuff. They don't understand the size of the marketplace.

The industry believes that children don't have any income. They think that if they don't have any income, why focus on them? In fact, seventy-five cents of every dollar spent by a family with pre-schoolers is spent based on the needs and wants of that pre-schooler.

They control more money than any other demographic base. They decide where you shop, where you eat, where you live, what kind of car you drive, where you go on vacation. You're not going to go to Istanbul with your kid. Disney understands that from their theme parks, but they don't understand that in their other entertainment vehicles.

I make a lot of wrong turns, but somehow I end up in the right place. I kind have always just followed my star, wherever it was.

So the idea that I could be this nothing, stupid-ass, and start this company -- hire forty people, have the hottest licensed program in the country, the highest rated new children's show on television -- is amazing. The idea that I could be developing other shows, putting programs on, having people standing on line saying, "what's the next program, can we have it?" It's amazing to me. It doesn't make sense. We can put more programs on air next year than Disney can. That's absurd. That's surprising.

Why hasn't Disney caught on?

They are so hung up on formula that they're not looking at what's going on in the market. For me -- I don't get that. When I was at Hunchback, I started screaming in the movie theatre. Screaming. I was with two other people. We just started screaming. You're laughing, but I'm serious! The sexual innuendo, the corruption, the negativity, the aggression. I was very embarrassed for our industry that this was the best thing we could put out for kids. All it did was cement my commitment to do this and do it well.

Children live in the exact same universe we do, but they perceive everything totally differently. If you want to make stuff for kids, you have to really be committed to it and you have to make sure that you're understanding that they are little people, that they're not just smaller versions of us. They are shaping and developing and learning. They don't operate the same way we do.
You can make a lot of money and do good things for kids at the same time. The two things are not mutually exclusive. My industry hasn't caught onto that yet. Many of them believe that to make a lot of money it means you have to sacrifice the quality of the stuff you make for kids.

I have a yin-yang thing where I like scary horror movies and Stephen King and those kind of books.

I say, make better quality stuff for the kids, even if it costs more. There are products that we're making that are more expensive than the competition's. But the quality is just better. It's more huggable. It sits up just right on the shelf. I know the parents are buying it. Yes, it means that we make money. And it means that they're happy and their children are happy. I'm determined in my own business to make sure that everybody wins.

So far we've been very good at achieving that. So far it's working. I don't know how much longer. I'm a fatalist, I guess, at the end of the day. But I do think it's the right idea, that parents are appreciative of it, and they are supporting our efforts.