 "Secrets of the Magic Kingdom"
In this Genius Network interview, Joe Polish talks to marketing and licensing genius Ken Kerr as he delves into the marketing side of the business with an inside look into his days at Disney.
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About Ken Kerr
The first time Kenneth A. Kerr Jr. saw a Walt Disney character dart across a movie screen, animation captured his imagination. All he could think about was some day, in some way, working for Disney. So he wrote a letter to his childhood hero, hoping for some advice and encouragement. When he received a reply, signed by Disney himself, he was ecstatic.
Ken worked "behind the curtains" to engineer the success of many of the great market winners in the past 30 years.
You will recognize some his projects: the Smurfs, the Wuzzles, the Gummi Bears, Paw Paws, Precious Moments, Tiny Toons, the Dancing Raisins, and many others. While employed at Disney, he was instrumental in the development of Epcot Center and their Tokyo theme park. He was involved with the Olympics and Sea World to help create some of the largest marketing achievements in recent history.
To put it into his own words, Ken knew "Hollywood's Real Money-Making Secret". He certainly should have -- he was the creative and marketing mastermind behind a lot of their huge successes. Many of the ideas he worked with were directly responsible for generating billions of dollars in licensing revenue.
In the early 1970's Ken was a young art director working for a very successful advertising agency in Hollywood, California - Group West, Inc. The agency specialized in advertising for motion pictures and did work for all the major movie and television studios.
Ken was privy to the numbers. He could see that about the time a movie began to make money, the studio would take the profit and ask Ken's firm to create a new campaign for Central and South America. When the movie was ready to make a profit in Central or South America, the studio would take the money and start a new promotion for Europe. When the film was profitable in Europe, they would take the money and do the same in Asia... well you get the idea.
Ken became very curious. Every time a movie just started to make money, the studio would spend the earnings doing ads for another country. If that was true, how did they continue to reap their huge profits?
It was about that time that the Walt Disney Company made Ken an offer he couldn't refuse. They bought him out of his agency and moved him over to Walt Disney Imagineering -- the brain trust behind all of the Disney theme parks.
His position was to head up the creative teams in development of Walt Disney's greatest dream -- EPCOT Center.
For the first time he was an "insider". One of his responsibilities was to work hand-in-hand with the legal division of Disney, in the creation as well as the protection of the Disney logos, characters, trademarks, and copyrights. Since he was responsible for the creative development of new characters, trademarks, and logos for EPCOT Center, he had a ringside seat to the secrets behind the financial horsepower of Disney's licensing and merchandising operation.
Mr. Kerr died July 24, 2004 at Scripps Memorial Hospital La Jolla. He was 61.
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