Rovio Entertainment

With Salesforce, our partners and agencies can bring new products to market faster. It enables us to maximise the growth opportunities of the Angry Birds brand.”

- Simo Hämäläinen, Senior Vice President for Brand Licensing, Rovio Entertainment
 

Rovio Entertainment flies high with innovative Angry Birds licensing platform

Stolen eggs. Hungry green pigs. A flock of furious, flying feathers. Angry Birds is a smartphone sensation, a multi-million-dollar grossing movie, and a lucrative licensed merchandise business.

And Rovio Entertainment, the trailblazing Finnish company responsible for creating the brand, is flying high, with annual revenues more than doubling between 2015 and 2017 to close to €300 million. As Rovio prepares for the 2019 launch of The Angry Birds Movie 2, the opportunities for brand licensing are set to soar.  “The 2016 movie was huge for us,” said Simo Hämäläinen, Rovio’s Senior Vice President for Brand Licensing. “It took $350 million at the box office, and created a huge demand for licensed merchandise. With Salesforce, we handled that explosive spike in demand with ease; the platform is now business-critical for us.”

 

Catapulting to the top of the charts one bird at a time

As Rovio prepares for the 2019 launch of The Angry Birds Movie 2, the opportunities for brand licensing are set to soar.  “The 2016 movie was huge for us,” said Simo Hämäläinen, Rovio’s Senior Vice President for Brand Licensing. “It took $350 million at the box office, and created a huge demand for licensed merchandise. With Salesforce, we handled that explosive spike in demand with ease; the platform is now a very important asset for scaling.”

Formed in 2003, success really came home to roost for Rovio in 2009 when Angry Birds – a game featuring a flock of birds used as wrecking balls that players slingshot at green pigs – was catapulted to the top of the download charts.

Angry Birds games have since been downloaded more than four billion times and Angry Birds has become one of the hottest global brands.

Thousands of brand licensees, agents, designers, and product developers as well as Rovio’s internal commercial and finance teams help to make the brand success. A success that has not only transformed its parent company but also the entertainment industry as a whole.

 

 

With Salesforce, we’re blazing a trail that could transform the whole entertainment industry. And with more customers and partners joining the Rovio flock every day, we can’t wait to see where the future takes us.”

Timo Pesola, VP for Operations and Business Performance, Rovio Entertainment

A bird’s eye view of global licensing activities

With so many people involved in the branding, merchandising, and licensing of Angry Birds, Hämäläinen and his colleagues needed a centralised platform to give them a bird’s eye view of activities around the globe.

“We were storing loads of information on Excel and email and had different partners using different systems,” said Timo Pesola, Vice President for Operations and Business Performance. “We needed a flexible and scalable platform to keep track of the entire licensing process: from leads,opportunities and contract templates to style guides, products approvals, reporting and invoicing. We wanted everything to be in one place.”

After seeing how Salesforce had helped Rovio’s advertising and sales teams transform their processes, Rovio’s  brand licensing team evaluated possibilities to implement Salesforce for licensing operations and decided to follow suit in 2016.

 

A single platform for a 1,000-strong flock of users

Today there are approximately 1,000 internal and external users of the platform — from product designers and developers to contract administrators and finance professionals. Rovio has also onboarded 20-plus licensing agents who help to sell the Angry Birds brand to manufacturers across the globe. “With Salesforce, the licensing process is not only easier but also faster,” said Hämäläinen. “We can share prospect and customer information between different teams and ensure nothing falls through the gaps.”

Opportunities are logged by agencies in Sales Cloud Lightning and then passed to the commercial team to agree the licensing terms. Thanks to apps and integrations, contracts can be signed and payments made all within the same platform. “We used to do everything manually,” recalled Pesola. “Now we have hundreds of contracts a year coming through Salesforce with a small team handling them. The final step is to integrate Salesforce into our invoicing system for that full 360-degree view.”

 

Simplified processes for product reviews and royalties

Rovio has also simplified the design and development of Angry Birds merchandise for companies around the world. It has created an image bank and product review platform on Community Cloud, which enables brand licensees/agencies to share designs for approval via a custom-built workflow.

Once a product hits the market, Rovio can track sales volumes to ensure royalties are calculated and distributed correctly with just a click of a button. “By making processes as easy and smooth as possible for our agents, they are likely to dedicate more time to Angry Birds instead of the licences of other big names in entertainment,” said Hämäläinen.

Rovio is blazing a trail in the entertainment industry

Building the world’s first licensing platform on Salesforce isn’t enough for a Trailblazer like Rovio; it now wants to leverage the power of artificial intelligence. “We’ve conducted a proof of concept with Einstein’s image recognition capabilities,” explained Hämäläinen. “This could have real business value in helping to detect fraudulent goods and piracy in the future. The more popular your brand, the more problems you have with piracy.”

And the popularity of the Angry Birds’ brand is set to hit new heights come August 2019 when the film is due to open in cinemas – and Rovio will be ready. “With Salesforce, our partners and agencies can bring new products to market faster. It enables us to maximise the growth opportunities of the Angry Birds brand,” said Hämäläinen.

 
 

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