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Stories from GG’s Toy Box
By Grahame Grassby
Story 19 — Where’s Wally? You’re Looking at Him…
In 2011 Stella Projects was the licensing agent for Where’s Wally in Australia & New Zealand.
The Stella Projects team at that time was Claire O’Connor, Head of Marketing & Promotions, Lou Elkington, Head of Licensing, Anna Dupree, Business Manager and myself.
Claire had closed some amazing promotional deals and Lou had brought on board a core group of quality consumer product licensees, whilst Anna and I managed the day to day running of the business.
At that time, there was a national outdoor Where’s Wally B-Pay campaign running that won a number of Australian & global advertising awards, a 12 month dedicated Where’s Wally location based experience at Sydney Aquarium, a Red Rooster fast food promotion, a Telecom NZ mobile phone promotion and even a promotion to find Wally on Bondi Beach, that was covered by commercial TV and radio media across Australia.
At retail, Jay Jays was running a national window campaign in all their stores for the Playcorp t-shirt range.
Armed with a presentation deck with all of this Where’s Wally success, I went to my meeting at the Brand Licensing Show in London with the new Head of Global Licensing at Classic Media confident of being congratulated on the wonderful job the team had been doing with the Where’s Wally property Down Under.
Ha! Wrong!
The London based Where’s Wally brand manager started the meeting off by asking why certain Playcorp products had been released before final sign off had been given, with the unforgettable line “just because artwork is in the style guide doesn’t mean the artwork is approved.”
At this point, my stomach began to turn as I realised I was facing a firing squad, not a cheer squad, and sure enough the hammer blow was delivered moments later by Classic Media’s New York based global queen of licensing.
“Grahame, we are terminating your agreement”.
I pushed forward the beautiful presentation document that Anna had prepared, stuttering “but have you seen…”
“You’re not going to be foolish enough to fight this, are you Grahame?”
“No I’m not actually”.
Where’s Wally? Wonder no more, I’m Wally and I’d just been fired.
This article originally appeared in Edition 19 of The Toy Universe Magazine
