“I've been working in this industry for 15 years and there is still so much to discover,” says Stefan Eipeltauer, proprietor of the online portal Fokus Kind Medien. “Over the course of the pandemic, it was our objective to get the industry to the same place, as far as cooperation was concerned, that many other industries had been operating in for years.” Eipeltauer, who recently made a name for himself with the ‘ARkid’ project on 3D and Augmented Reality Visualisation, was referring to industries such as energy, air travel and logistics, where networked information is an everyday reality. This means platforms, systems and tools that allow both newcomers to the industry and experts who have been working in it for years to obtain detailed information about their sector at any time. Company and target group data around the world can be called up, products presented, service providers found and information processing interfaces between businesses exploited. “In our industry, this happens either not at all or in the manner of a one-way street. This creates an enormous amount of work for every company. Retailers, for example, have to deal with a mountain of emails, Excel files, product PDFs, B2B shops, Dropbox and WeTransfer links. Each of them differently designed and based on a different logic. It generates vast, quite unnecessary redundancies.”

A B2B platform for products and people

Prompted by the pandemic, the industry has already taken a large number of steps towards digitalisation. Not all of these have been crowned with success, and the issue raised by ‘The Kids Industry’ of a comprehensive and well balanced hub for all the industry is justified. This would be a living catalogue of the industry, actively maintained and with potential to reduce the amount of ‘stupid work’ undertaken: work that costs companies a lot of time and can be better processed centrally by interfaces and algorithms.

“At the start of the project,” explains Eipeltauer, “we set ourselves a simple task. How could you find in five minutes an overview of the brands, distributors, retailers, industry associations and media … in, say, Canada? It’s actually impossible – it would require weeks of research.”

The presentation and usability of ‘The Kids Industry’ (TKI) has already convinced many of those in the industry. In seconds, at the click of a mouse, there appear thousands of brands, about 256,000 retailers worldwide, hundreds of industry media in the B2C and B2B sectors, or industry associations from Japan to Portugal. But TKI is intended to deal not only with research and information on the industry. Product manufacturers large and small can use the service free of charge to manage their products, catalogues, videos and contacts centrally.

Market intelligence and tools for professionals

The hub positions itself as a B2B network like LinkedIn, but concentrated on our own industry. Linked to this is a ‘Discovery’ area with a Netflix feel, where products, videos, AR models, live streams and more can be discovered. The ‘Directory’ component incorporates a global industry overview and is divided into brands, products, people, companies, organisations, media, traders and suppliers. The latter covers everything from PR agencies to production companies and business consultants. Anyone looking for a contact will definitely have come to the right place.

A wide-ranging ‘Update’ area draws on news from B2B news portals around the world and provides at a glance over 50 items of news a day from the industry. But Shows & Events, Interviews, Surveys and Jobs also make themselves known to industry experts here. Businesses looking deeper into the data structures of the market and wishing to pick up new information are well catered for in the Business Intelligence area of the site. Here, the areas of World Reports, Social Media Rankings, App Rankings, Trends & Insights and the Academy can be researched.

But that won’t be all, and ‘The Kids Industry’ also aims to offer tools for practical applications. These would include global price monitoring, SEO analysis, an asset cloud and a ‘social listening’ tool for observing a brand or product’s resonance on the various social networks. One thing that ‘The Kids Industry’ decidedly does not wish to be is an ordering portal – on that, Stefan Eipeltauer is clear. He does not like the idea that such vital business data as sales figures should be held on centralised platforms.

“All in all, our aim is that The Kids Industry should support the sector and deal with the precise needs of the various participants,” he makes clear. “We have no wish to take sides, but aim to offer a service that is transparent and balanced to all. That way, we create a platform for meeting, for new ideas, for information. We are already delighted at the friends and partners who want to strike out in this direction with us.