In Japan, the management of anime series as intellectual properties has developed over a long-time span, growing into a sophisticated system of transmedia serialization professionally known as the “media mix.” Content derived from well-established anime series, however, is not exclusively developed to promote spin-offs and merchandise notoriously associated with fans and otaku subcultures. In a changing domestic market, it is increasingly exploited to add value to products and services in unprecedented commercial spheres, including drinks, tourism, and urban requalification. By taking the 40th anniversary of Mobile Suit Gundam as a case study, this chapter reflects on recent trends in anime licensing, providing a brief introduction to their effects on what might be called “extended” anime distribution. Through this perspective, it becomes possible to identify a series of apparently unrelated phenomena that are nonetheless connected to the aging of anime series and the changing demographics of their consumers.

This chapter highlights the (often) anti-establishment feature of street and graffiti art, explaining that many artists within these communities believe there is no contradiction between this element of their creative practice and showing interest in copyright regimes as well as taking commissions, doing merchandising and in general accepting the institutional art market. It also focuses on the selling out dilemma and the so-called paradox of consumerist anti-consumerism. The chapter then draws some similarities between the graffiti subculture and the advertising world.

Brands are the lingua franca through which individuals, celebrities, politicians, cities, and more distinguish themselves in a brand new world. Universities are no exception. Indeed, university brands are among the world’s most recognizable and valuable brands. Harvard rivals Hermès in prestige and exclusivity – and is certainly more elusive than the purchase of a tie or scarf. This volume explores the brand as media and mediator, the filter through which the modern university perceives, represents, and ultimately remakes itself. Today the brand goes far beyond a school name, coat of arms, logo, colors, or a mascot. The university brand seeks to capture and commodify as completely as possible the aesthetic value in belonging and participating in an academic community and its storied past. The aesthetic move in property seeks to capitalize on all thought and pleasure associated with one’s alma mater. The aesthetic university is a stage on which transformative life experiences are enacted, recast, and traded.

It is hard to reconcile the research university’s supposed reason for being – the reasoned pursuit of knowledge – with its methods for building brand awareness and equity. Just like pitches for other luxury goods, the selling of higher education depends on irrational appeals devoid of information and marketing missives meant to hug the line between legally protected puffery and outright fraud. Although universities have always borrowed from the selling strategies of the commercial sphere, in recent years, there has been a sea change in the prevalence and degree of less-than-truthful content in higher educational self-promotion. How do university constituents – administrators, professors, students – interpret this gap between their institutions’ traditionally understood role and the logic of today’s academic branding strategies? The chapter chronicles the main rationalizations these actors deploy to reduce the tension between academic mission and academic marketing. By telling themselves that their school’s advertising efforts can be quarantined from the university’s larger purpose or actually provide tangible and truthful information to outside audiences or are a necessary evil, university constituents reduce their internal dissonance but fail to confront the realities of academic branding.

The book’s conclusion returns to the commercialisation of Alice in Wonderland by considering the controversy surrounding Jonathan Miller’s 1966 Alice film, screened by the BBC. The art film offered a surreal Victorian dreamscape of childhood, as much for an erudite adult audience as for a child audience. It was a representation that was highly unlikely to have concerned Dodgson at all but was considered controversial enough to provoke public responses of hostility and incomprehension, attracting protests about a liberality that ought to be banned. This controversy allows us to reference changed understandings of childhood. Particularly in light of Disney’s rendition of Alice and the development of the BBC’s institutional role in the 1960s, where there was ready acceptance of the children’s department remit, with the imagery of the child overlaid with expectations of marketing and age-appropriate merchandise. Many issues that vexed the BBC in this period are rooted in the paradox that underpins the whole book: the tension between exploitation and innocence; family and market; public and private; and the normalisation of the logic of commercialisation tied to intellectual property.

The tangled beginnings of the establishment of merchandising at the BBC are further developed in Chapter 7. The most troubling question for the corporation was how, in line with the organisation’s traditional public values and duties as expressed in its charter and broadcasting licence, it should respond to the exploitation of radio identities such as ‘Uncle Mac’, a persona linked to the radio star and BBC employee Derek McCulloch, that were, without authority, also being commercialised on everyday consumer goods by outsiders to the corporation. Internal dynamics at the BBC were further impacted by the development of commercial television and the unexpected success of television programmes such as Dr Who. As expectations shifted, rather than being criticised for commercialisation, it was the public corporation’s failure to pursue profit that became contentious. One outcome of this was the development of a new management unit separate from programming, the BBC Exploitation Department, later renamed as BBC Television Enterprises, which served as merchandising agent for third-party productions such as The Magic Roundabout and The Wombles. Both instances resulted in litigation.

Chapter 4 explores the foundation of extended business activities and tie-ins in the 1920s and 1930s that developed around Felix the Cat and Mickey Mouse. The term ‘animated properties’ acknowledges that these popular fictional representations were attributed subjecthood and, as such, came alive outside the celluloid frame. Felix and Mickey were pre-packaged as family-friendly viewing. Doll effigies and other merchandise literally took the characters into the heart of the home. The chapter discusses the ambivalent role of intellectual property registration in stabilising the character merchandising trade, exploring what was particularly distinctive about the Disney Corporation’s industrial system of production and distribution. This successful strategy was an organisational one with cultural ambitions, engaging franchise managers and licensees in educating children and the trade about the protocols of consumption attached to play. The Disney brand came to signify child-friendly cultural content of all kinds, with trust in the name secured by the deployment of a new legal creation, the phenomenon of ‘world rights’ exploited by a new managerial class, Disney Enterprises’ agents.