Yesterday, we got wind of some presentation slides by Hasbro that found their way onto the internet. Now that we've had a chance to look at them a bit more thoroughly, let's recap what exactly they've shown us.
Keep in mind that almost everything in the slides is noted to be tentative and subject to change, so what actually happens may be quite different than what Hasbro has laid out at the moment.
My Little Pony: Tell Your Tale
- Tell Your Tale season 1 will conclude in December 2023, with a final total of 70 episodes and 24 songs. Since episode 54 was released today, there will be 16 more episodes (and 7 more songs) over the course of the next 6 months; at some point the episode releases may have to be weekly instead of biweekly.
- Tell Your Tale will be the premier MLP show in 2024. One slide of the "2024 Franchise Overview" presentation even refers to it as the "ONE & ONLY PONABLE CONTENT SERIES". As previously reported, Season 2 of Tell Your Tale has been greenlit, and the show is to have weekly releases throughout 2024, as well as four specials in March, August, October and November.
- There will be a total of 328 minutes of Tell Your Tale in 2024. What this probably means is that there will be 48 5-minute episodes and four 22-minute episodes, since this works out to exactly 328 minutes. (The inevitable tradeoff of weekly releases is that it would be basically impossible to make all of the episodes 22 minutes long.)
- The first and third of the four specials will be "tentpole moments" (i.e. the major releases of the year). Along with the first special, in March, there will be PR for an "influencer talent reveal" and a "featured music artist reveal", and the show will be marketed with a "themed brand video featuring [the] influencer talent". Through the rest of the year, the show will also be marketed through a "region-specific media support featuring cross-category product", whatever that means, and a "region-specific pony dance party music campaign" on Facebook, Instagram and TikTok.
- New Tell Your Tale episodes will continue being premiered on YouTube. Episodes from both seasons 1 and 2 will also be available on Netflix in 2024.
- Season 2 of Tell Your Tale will "double down on core themes". Apparently, those core themes are "hair play in every episode" and "more magical moments". I'm not sure if this actually means anything.
- Hasbro commissioned "AIM & We Are Family" to do some analyses for them in March 2023, which are referred to as "MLP Shopper Analysis" and "TYT Audience Report". According to these analyses, Tell Your Tale outperformed other MLP shows (i.e. Make Your Mark and Friendship Is Magic) in terms of approval rate among the target audience, average basket size of toy purchases, and repeat purchase rate. They found that 93 percent of girls aged 2–8 who watched the show liked it, and that 45 percent of them watched it multiple times per week. They also found that the average "basket size" for TYT toy purchases was $84, and that the repeat purchase rate for such toys was 56 percent. The toys apparently even outperform those of other brands targeting the same demographic like Barbie and Rainbow High.
- As usual, there are a bunch of numbers of questionable significance in the presentation. Hasbro aims to grow Tell Your Tale viewership by 84 percent in the first half of 2024. By the end of April 2023, there were 171 million total video views for Tell Your Tale on YouTube, of which 11.5 million were from viewers in North America (YouTube is not able to geolocate all users so this may be an underestimate, though they did not note this on the slides). There were also 1.57 million streams of Tell Your Tale songs on Spotify from September 2022 to April 2023. Most of the other big numbers featured refer to the entire MLP franchise rather than G5 specifically.
My Little Pony: Make Your Mark
- According to the "2023 Marketing Plans" presentation slide, this year will see the release of the rest of the Make Your Mark episodes that were originally ordered in 2021. Chapter 5 will have 6 episodes, while Chapter 6 will have 3 episodes and 1 special; the final special will be titled and marketed as "Secrets of Starlight".
- We are reliably informed that Chapter 5 will be released on September 18, 2023, and Chapter 6 will be released on November 23, 2023.
- The presentation "2024 Franchise Overview" does not include any information about 2024's Make Your Mark content. This is probably because there isn't any; it seems that Hasbro concluded that Tell Your Tale was the more successful show among the target demographic. The only slide discussing the future of Make Your Mark just states that it will stay on Netflix in 2024, and the rest of the presentation is focused squarely on Tell Your Tale.
- From March 2024, certain "G5 content" (presumably both Tell Your Tale and Make Your Mark) will no longer be exclusive to Netflix and YouTube, and episodes will be released on TV channels and ad-supported free streaming services (presumably that's what "linear and AVOD" means).
Other stuff
- There's a new Izzy brushable shown on some of the slides. She has a rainbow-colored mane, and her cutie mark has a protruding button that you can press down to activate something.
- The presentation also appears to show photos of some other toys paired with concept art drawings for their accessories, including a wheelbarrow for Misty, a scooter for Sunny, and some kind of portable salon cart thing for Pipp.
- There will be a new console video game released in the third quarter of 2024.
- Existing games will also be updated with new content in 2024. Weirdly, the slides imply that the games that will be updated are the console game A Maretime Bay Adventure, the Roblox game Visit Maretime Bay and the mobile game My Little Pony World, even though the former two have stopped being updated (and the Roblox game is no longer available). It's not clear if the Apple Arcade-exclusive Mane Merge will also see updates.
- The "2023 Marketing Plans" slide implies that a 40th anniversary music album will be released as a vinyl or CD this year.
- Hasbro has partnered with Target, the fashion designer Prabal Gurung, and New York Fashion Week for branded MLP clothing, which will be sold in stores and/or worn by runway models.
Twitter: @_overcast07
