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US
kids brand Nickelodeon and Viacom Consumer Products have appointed
Laurent Taieb as director, consumer products for France.
This
is part of the company’s strategic commitment to expand and
grow its regional consumer products business, which includes
upcoming launches of properties including Go Diego Go!, Avatar,
South Park and The Backyardigans. In this newly created position,
Taieb will oversee all day-to-day Nickelodeon and Viacom Consumer
Products’ in-house licensing and promotional activities in
France.
Taieb
will report jointly to Nickelodeon VP and Viacom Consumer
Products MD Jean–Philippe Randisi and MTV France MD and GM
Thierry Cammas. Taieb was previously Licensing Director at
European licensing agent MPG Partenariat.
Randisi
says, “Laurent's expert insight and relationships within the
French market, in addition to his knowledge of Nickelodeon's
properties from his years as our partner licensing agent,
CPLG, make him the ideal choice to further extend our consumer
products business in France which is already the second biggest
in Europe.
 "Working
in close collaboration with our newly launched Nickelodeon
channel in France and terrestrial partners, Laurent will identify
opportunities to grow Nickelodeon's hit properties such as
Dora the Explorer and SpongeBob SquarePants across new categories,
as well as enhancing retail partnerships” .
Nick
adds that Dora the Explorer has achieved success across Europe
since the property’s mass consumer products launch in 2005;
in France it became the fastest growing toy license ever for
Fisher Price, and the number two toy property overall. In
2005 alone, more than two million Dora the Explorer books
were sold in the market and the premiere issue of the property’s
collectible magazine & CD-Rom sold more than 550K copies
in the first 12 days of issue.
Viacom
says that this appointment underlines its commitment to leveraging
the global scale of its consumer products business and accelerating
the expansion of licensing and merchandising activities throughout
Europe, especially in key markets such as France. It also
marks an increased partnership across the MTVNI channel, programme
syndication and consumer products businesses in the region.
 Cammas
said, “With the new MTV Networks TV channels portfolio strategy
in France (Nickelodeon, MTV, MTV Pulse, MTV Idol and Game
One), allowing MTVNI to deepen its connection with French
audiences, and the huge success we have already witnessed
in the consumer products arena, we are perfectly placed to
aggressively build on this positioning. Laurent is a well
respected veteran of the consumer products business with an
extensive knowledge of the market, and I’m thrilled to have
him on-board at this exciting time.”
Taieb’s
main responsibilities at Nickelodeon and Viacom Consumer Products
and MTVNF will be to manage all local consumer products activities,
including tentpole events, development and coordination of
the organisation’s retail presence, plus management of day-to-day
relationships with agents such as TF1 Licenses (SpongeBob
SquarePants) and CPL. Working with MTVN France, Taieb will
raise the company’s profile, grow sales and leverage relationships
with major partners, including toy, home video, video game
and promotions partners, in conjunction with category heads
in London.
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