MPPIA 2014/15 Plan : Where Collaboration meets Opportunity

With fiscal 2014 already well underway, the MPPIA Executive is acting on our strategic plan objectives emphasizing communications and membership in the near term. On the latter note, MPPIA is very pleased to welcome newest Charter members to our Board of Directors as of April 2014: Atomic Cartoons and Nerd Corps. Having two prominent BC animation companies join our membership and Board demonstrates our direction and long term intent.

Our newest members join us in the collective goal to derive value from member collaborations that ultimately benefit all of BC’s creative industries’ direct and indirect stakeholders. This involves managing and improving BC’s value proposition as an attractive and adaptable business environment for entertainment content creation and distribution. Beyond that, we aim to work together on ‘big picture’ communications with all BC’s creative industries including music and publishing; as well, we want to build connections with other BC business sectors with similar interests — digital (beyond entertainment), tourism and trade — to effectively build a greater understanding of BC’s talent and knowledge driven economy both for ourselves, and for everyone in BC.

As an Association, we have made progress over the past three years stretching beyond traditional competitive priorities and interests in production to explore new opportunities. With funding from Western Economic Diversification on a three year project launched in early 2011, MPPIA executed a three year business development and investment attraction program designed to help us expand beyond traditional markets and tactics. Again, collaboration was key to the success of this project, and we worked closely with members, and specifically with the Canadian Media Production Association and Creative BC on international missions — to provide BC’s screen production community with opportunities to expand their markets and businesses.

This initiative successfully fulfilled the project vision and created legacy benefits that are driving our plans moving forward. Some of the highlights of our three year project include:

* Expanded presence and reach in the Los Angeles market with in-market representation, six missions including a business development foray to LA for BC producers (CMPA led mission) and a series of missions/events for BC’s entire industry across the supply chain (MPPIA led over 3 years); a newly established familiarization client tour program carried out by MPPIA members in cooperation with Creative BC.

* A CMPA led ‘bootcamp’ for BC producers aimed at building north-south opportunities in the Los Angeles market and ensuring market readiness.

* Three consecutive years of heightened presence for BC at Hong Kong Filmart (industry missions led by Creative BC), enabling BC producers to benefit from more substantial programming and build business contacts, relationships and new business in this unique marketplace.

* Two missions led by the CMPA to the United Kingdom for BC producers and BC animation producers. These missions brought BC content creators together with counterpart companies and broadcasters in two important UK markets. All mission participants reported high value returns for these missions, establishing of key business relationships and in some cases, new business.

* Development of MPPIA member database/website with built in market intel database;

* Strategic planning to build a new creative industries strategy and corresponding narrative in British Columbia.

The one word that defined the success of this project is ‘collaboration’ and it is the same one that will drive MPPIA’s mandate in both the near and long term, whether to achieve membership growth, BC market growth or a better understanding of BC’s creative industries and the growing creative economy in BC. As an Association it has always been our mandate to transcend singular interests to work on competitiveness and sustainability across common interests. This approach is driven by the thinking that broad based collaboration builds the kind of robust and confident business environment that naturally draws interest and investment — because it exposes opportunities instead of managing threats.

This makes for an exciting value proposition for all of us — and it is on that foundation that I look forward to collaborating with industry on our common objectives in the coming year.

Peter Leitch, Chair
Motion Picture Production Industry Association of BC