Bringing Home (and Keeping) the Bacon

Over the last few years, licensed properties are increasingly playing a central role in programs that teach financial literacy to adults and children. The IPs are a way to not only raise awareness for these promotions, but to make the subject matter more accessible, interesting, and fun. Recent initiatives, mostly featuring characters or celebrities, take a variety of forms. Rather than being ongoing programs, they are typically short term and often tied to Financial Literacy Month, which occurs in April each year:

• Rebel Girls paired with Greenlight, a company that offers free financial literacy materials to classrooms, in April of this year. As part of the promotion, Rebel Girls created Rebel Girls Growing Up Powerful: Money Matters, a financial literacy guidebook available for distribution in classrooms, libraries, and retail stores.

• Hip-hop artist T-Pain teamed with the banking app Chime to promote financial literacy, something the musician has struggled with in the past, and make it more approachable. T-Pain visited a college course at Clark Atlanta University as part of the venture. Other elements of the promotion included giveaways of budget-themed coloring books (“coloring budgets”) signed by T-Pain, VIP tickets to the performer’s tour, and financial advising sessions for life. This initiative also occurred this year in April.

• In another April 2024 program, Discovery Education, a digital learning platform, released a variety of financial literacy resources, including in partnership with the NBA and WNBA. This is part of the partners’ ongoing Game Changers program, a standards-aligned curriculum for schools that is focused on civic engagement, in which NBA and WNBA players record their stories about how they make positive change, with the subject for April being financial literacy. The partners have done similar programs for a few years in conjunction with Financial Literacy Month.

• FICO, an analytics software firm and marketer of the FICO score used by 90% of lenders to assess credit-worthiness, paired with pro tennis player Chris Eubanks in March of this year to raise awareness of the need for financial and credit education. As part of the venture, the athlete visited students in Miami, where the Miami Open was taking place at the time. FICO also paired with Richard Childress Racing and NASCAR driver Kyle Bush around the same time. Bush drove a FICO branded car in a race, and presentations were held around the time of the event, with resources on the topic offered.

• In May 2023, Marvel Comics paired with Visa and OneUnited Bank, the largest Black-owned bank in the U.S., creating a free custom comic book featuring Black Panther and Shuri, with up to 500 copies distributed in the bank’s branches and a digital version given to participants of its annual financial literacy contest. The comic, produced by Marvel and sponsored by Visa, incorporated lessons developed by OneUnited Bank. Marvel and Visa have paired for other financial literacy programs in the past.

• Hasbro partnered with Varsity Tutors in June 2022 for Monopoly Presents Money Matters Financial Literacy Camp, a weeklong, two-hour-per-day themed virtual summer camp for kids. Varsity Tutors, a live online tutoring platform, is owned by Nerdy, an online learning company. Students were exposed to budgeting, personal finance, entrepreneurship, economics, business strategy, and marketing. The gamified activities included simulations based on Monopoly game play.

Financial literacy partnerships involving licensed properties are not new; examples have popped up regularly over the years, especially in April. But the frequency of such initiatives has accelerated as more parents, educators, and lawmakers increasingly realize the benefit of teaching financial literacy at a young age. People now have ways of making money early in life, through activities such as social media influencing or Etsy businesses, which some analysts also believe is helping drive the need for financial literacy education for kids and young adults.

From a licensing point of view, this space is also still relatively uncluttered when it comes to the presence of licensed IP, making it an attractive place to be from the perspective of owners of relevant properties. These types of promotions are also socially positive and can offer the brand owners a halo effect.

According to the TIAA Institute-GFLEC Personal Finance Index, a global survey conducted each year, just 48% of U.S. adults are financially literate in 2024, with the figure stagnating around 50% each year since 2017. Teaching children and young adults about the subject, including by using popular celebrities, characters, or other properties, may be a way to bump that figure up in the future.

Watch for Raugust Communications’ monthly e-newsletter next Tuesday, May 21, 2024. The Licensing Topic of the Month will focus on the growth of agencies and consultancies offering fractional leadership as one of their services, while the Datapoint research spotlight will examine licensed products’ share of the global beauty industry. If you have not yet subscribed to this free publication, please sign up here.