Tom Ascheim & Tricia Melton Launch Consultancy, Talk State Of Kids & YA Content, Future Of Streaming & More
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EXCLUSIVE: Longtime entertainment executives Tom Ascheim and Tricia Melton, who worked together at Warner Bros. Discovery and Freeform, have launched Pith and Pixie Dust, a consulting firm. With the new venture, Ascheim, former President Of Warner Bros. Global Kids, Young Adults and Classic, and Melton, former CMO of WBD Global Kids, Young Adults and Classics, plan to assist companies with integrating storytelling into their brand strategy and creating content as well as use their expertise in kids, family and YA to work with brands that want to reach and engage with those audiences.
Pith and Pixie Dust will be based in Los Angeles, with presence in New York and clients from around the world. The company already is working with a couple of international companies.
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“We love the idea of pixie dust because we do believe that, having spent our entire careers in entertainment and in storytelling, there is magic to that that we can bring,” Melton said about the duo’s choice of name for the company. “The pith part of that is that in addition to the magic, you also need substance, you need to have a very specific strategy, a very succinct way of talking about your business strategy or your brand’s strategy. And the marriage of those two things, pith and pixie dust, is the perfect symmetry of that.”
Melton said that she and Ascheim both started fielding calls from people following their 2022 exits from WBD in post-merger restructurings. They ultimately decided to turn that into a business.
“It does feel like the time is very ripe,” Melton said. “So many different industries are going through massive transformation right now.”
Added Ascheim, “We see an opportunity in the turmoil that is our industry, and it feels like it is ripe for some experienced hands to help a lot of people in the entertainment business try to figure out how to become the next version of themselves. The heart of that for us is about storytelling.”
Ascheim and Melton are taking on a kids and YA marketplace that has seen some contraction lately.
“I wish it were better,” Ascheim said. “The need and the demand among children and young adults — just like the rest of us — is constant. If anything, when you measure it in terms of hours of consumption, it’s more than it’s ever been and yet, there seems to be less commitment from the platforms to those audiences than there’s ever been. There is no MTV at the moment, Nickelodeon is a shell of its former self, so is Cartoon, so is Disney. So, one of the things we believe is, there’s opportunity against both of those audiences to do more and do better, and it’s definitely part of where we’re going to spend our time and our focus.”
Overall, the cut in spending on streaming content as media companies started to prioritize profits is not surprising.
“I think we were due for a correction,” Ascheim said. “There’s this sense of the library being bigger than my ability to consume it, so making more things that people want doesn’t feel like a good practice. And then the Netflix-modeled cost-plus version of how we’ve gotten here the last decade ultimately motivates people to spend a lot more money on content.”
Ascheim recalled a recent meeting with a studio head who was talking to him about a show they are making for $20 million an hour.
“If we spend $8M [per episode], we would be spending a lot; I don’t understand how we got here but we’ll take the money,” Ascheim said that person told him.
“We bloated, and that’s not a good thing, so getting back to whatever the right number of objects to watch is right,” Ascheim added. “I think we will end up with more deficit financing, going back to the future as we did so everybody’s got skin in the game. I think that’s all healthy even though it’s going be super painful.”
While the spending trims are understandable, the disproportionate targeting of kids and YA content with them is not, according to Ascheim.
“The thing that’s ironic about cutting kids and young adults is it tends to be the least expensive content,” he said. “I don’t know why you would decide to cut all the content that cost less per half-hour than the stuff that costs more and more and more but getting you the best bang for the buck.”
Added Melton, “It’s always surprising to me because kids and young adults are the futurist. They are the puck, often literally, they create the cultural trends. To ignore kids and young adults is a missed opportunity.”
Such cuts have impacted Netflix, Disney as well as WBD, with HBO Max pulling away from live-action kids and family programming and cutting a number of kids animated shows in summer 2022 before the streamer signaled a return to the kids animation space at the time of its rebrand as Max in May.
Ascheim and Melton said that they are proud of their accomplishments both at WBD, where they worked on creating “a new strategic plan and a vision for the future” for such brands as Cartoon Network and Adult Swim and TCM, the studios they’re in as well as the Harry Potter franchise, and at Freeform, where “we took a channel that was financially successful but had no strategic role inside the company and had not a lot of content that distinguished it in the mind of the people who we worked with, and I think we changed a lot of that.”
Both are open to Pith and Pixie Dust working with both WBD and Freeform. “There are great people there, and I think they also need a lot of help,” Ascheim said.
Disney’s Freeform over the past several months has pared down the number of its original series as it is recalibrating its original strategy, and it also is adjusting to a smaller cable footprint following Spectrum’s move to drop it, along with 7 other Disney cable networks, in exchange for distribution of Disney+’s ad-supported tier.
“I understand Disney’s need to prioritize,” Ascheim said. “I think part of what we originally pitched the idea of Freeform to [Disney CEO] Bob Iger. We talked about, I think it was $4 trillion dollars of influence by young adults, and this idea that it’s always been an essential part of all great storytelling, and I think he really bought in. I think they’ve just shied away from what felt like a big opportunity for that company. And I think they’re in trouble and I think that’s too bad.”
Ascheim also shared his perspective on how streaming will evolve, following the broadcast-cable dynamic.
He pointed to the time when “broadcast was the game in town, and broadcast did a little bit of everything.” “And then the thesis of cable, birthed by great entrepreneurs was, if you really focus on a particular genre or audience, you can maybe get those people to pay a lot of attention.”
That led to the creation of cable networks focused on news, documentary programming, kids. “Segmentation became really important and focus became really important and the brands that went with that became really important,” Ascheim said about the decades-long reign of cable.
“Now, five million years later, here we are, and we are returning, it feels like, to broadcast networks; they’re just called streamers. They do a little bit of everything and it’s great; a little bit of everything’s very important. But you are denied the focus that comes with the attention of people who are experts in a particular field.
“And I think that, if I was going to make a prediction over time, there will be segmentation within inside those streamers. Maybe it’ll be brands that are sub brands, maybe it’ll be specialists, maybe it’ll be production companies that service a variety of them but I don’t think that they can do all things for all people and be equally successful. We’ve seen this movie before, I just think we’re gonna see it done a little differently next time, but I’m eager for that opportunity.”
Added Melton, “Brands absolutely still matter. I do think, in the mad dash and the upheaval of streaming, that got a little subdued. But I predict, like Tom does, that ultimately we’ll come back to that.”
She and Ascheim are launching their new company following the end of the WGA strike, with the SAG-AFTRA work stoppage still ongoing. A main point in the negotiations, which the writers made progress on in their deal, is for the streamers to share viewership data.
“The strikes have been super painful and I was hoping that they would motivate a lot of data sharing,” Ascheim said. “As we all know Nielsen, as imperfect as it’s been, was wildly useful, it made all of us know what was successful. And these days we don’t know, and when we don’t know, we make stupid assumptions and I think we could use some clarity. So hopefully the industry does a better job of getting clarity; I think it will organize our business better.”
Ascheim and Melton both bring decades of entertainment executive experience to Pith and Pixie Dust. Before becoming President of Freeform, Ascheim served as general manager of Nickelodeon Television, chief strategy officer of Sesame Workshop and EVP of Sesame Learning. Before her tenure as SVP, Marketing, Brand, Creative, and Communications at Freeform, Melton worked as SVP of Entertainment Marketing and Branding for TBS, TNT, and TCM, and VP of Marketing for Lifetime Television.
As Ascheim and Melton embark on a new career as consultants, wound any of them consider returning to the executive ranks?
“You can never say never but I think this is going be a good and fun adventure that Tricia and I are going to have together,” Ascheim said about launching Pith and Pixie Dust.
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