Imagine: Success

Calendar last year, in 2008, we sold 1 million units.

It's a good performance, but it's a big installed base - the total we're going after is about 9 or 10 million now, and proportionally in favour of that demographic.

We have the EMEA and US territories as the two Ubisoft pillars - the US does phenomenally well, and we saw from the E3 press conference the focus it has there. France and the UK sit very closely together - the UK performs better in some titles, France in others, but those two countries plus Germany are the key territories.

Spain has issues with piracy, but the range does perform well there, while Australia does very well within the context of its own market. Italy's also pretty good.

The brand also exists under different names - in the UK and US it's Imagine, in France it's Lea - the name of a person, Lea Passion - which is a similar brand identity.

It's definitely important - sometimes you'll find titles that will perform better in some countries than others, and with advertising, while we follow a general EMEA approach... in the UK the kids grow up a little bit faster, they're a bit more media-aware in terms of celebrity than in France or Italy - where celebrity isn't quite so important at a younger age.

Hence the involvement of Fearne Cotton and Holly Willoughby [in the UK marketing] last year, and also this year. We see nuances in the marketing, and in making the products appeal - whereas generically, the games themselves are more likely to appeal to all kids across a territory because a teacher is a teacher, and fashion is what it is.

Teacher, Babies, Dream Weddings, Fashion Model, and Doctor's been strong since launch as well. It's really the more unique titles that seem to stand out, because obviously now the DS market is a lot more saturated - so the most successful ones are those for which similar games don't exist.

Yes - that's definitely happened. Last year there was a lot of competitive activity for Imagine. Some of it was released, some of it wasn't. I think what happened is that actually there is a barrier to entry: one, you need to have publisher weight to get them on the shelves, arrange them together; and two, to get distribution you need to focus a lot of investment behind them to convince retail they're being supported.

All of these elements added together actually creates a lot of difficulty for publishers to actually get involved. It's still difficult for us to do - we still have to compete for space with some of the core titles from our fold here, and other publishers. You've really got to convince retail with the money you're spending.

What happened with Imagine last year is that we had the big endorsement from Fearne and Holly, the money we were spending media-wise, the engagement, the way we were arranging point of sale, the whole 360-degree plan which helped define Imagine as a well-supported brand.

We were going to drive awareness - we had X-Factor spots, we had the sort of things that cost a lot of money. So if you're coming into it and you've got to spend more than GBP 1 million on advertising and marketing, you're going to look at the return on investment... the risk is still there.

I think it's lots of different elements. I think if you've got a core concept of a game that's unique, excellent, you're marketing it... look at something like Pepper Pig previously - we've got that license now, but they came to market with a relatively small spend.

So I think licensing products and things like that do very well if you've got a strong concept, a strong idea that's going to work and appeal, with research that backs it up. There's always room for that area, it's just that if you're looking at ranges, and especially with the Imagine target range, the barriers to entry are there.

But that doesn't mean it's prohibitive.