ole's hand in the Cookie Jar Entertainment story

Cookie Jar Entertainment, in the relatively short six years of its existence, has established itself as one of the world's pre-eminent independent kids companies. Its library of close to 6000 half-hour episodes of some of the world's most recognizable series' on television including Caillou, Inspector Gadget, Arthur, The Doodlebops and Johnny Test, is testament to the company's dynamic growth. In 2008, its acquisition of DIC Entertainment, the Copyright Promotions Licensing Group (CPLG) and a one-third interest in international children's television channel, KidsCo, doubled the company's library of family programming and strengthened its capabilities in global merchandising and licensing.

ole, which has become dominant as the premier publisher and administrator of children's television music, struck a music publishing co-ownership and worldwide administration deal with Cookie Jar for its quickly expanding music catalogue in the summer of 2009. Since then, ole, with offices in Toronto, Los Angeles and Nashville, has managed Cookie Jar's music publishing properties worldwide.

"The relationship with ole has been a good one," says Cookie Jar Group CEO and co-founder Michael Hirsh, an icon in the field of children's and family entertainment, who was also co-founder of Nelvana Limited back in 1971. "It allowed us to focus on some of the other areas that we wanted to grow and to benefit from having one strong music publisher in the country that's aggregating a lot of rights and have them be very focused on collecting the money."

Cookie Jar's business is multi-faceted, as Hirsh explains: "There's a lot of activity here and we're in a lot of different parts of the industry. What's interesting about our business is that there are so many different parts to it. You're in production; you're in distribution; you're in merchandising and licensing; you're in brand building; you're in music publishing… there's a ton of stuff that goes on.

"We came to music publishing at Nelvana when we really started to up our production. That was around 1985 when we began producing shows like Care Bears for the U.S. network. Those shows generated a lot of strong publishing income and so we were able to sign up and get our share."

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