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| Tilting @ Windmills v2 #5 |
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by Brian Hibbs [#122 – May 2004 – “S.S., D.D.”] I think it’s time to talk about advertising. Certainly, it is listed as the number one project of the International Comics Art Association, and there have been other recent attempts like TokyoPop’s advertising campaign or Marvel’s announcement of the distribution of 2 million copies of Marvel Age Spider-Man to school children. So, it’s in the zeitgeist. First off, let’s be clear that attempts to expand the marketing message of comics are to be applauded. We can really use all of the help we can get. The problem is, in my mind, that we’re not doing these things correctly, or in a manner that will significantly increase sales. Let’s
try a “for instance” using Marvel’s announcement of distribution
of 2 million comics to schoolchildren. This sounds like a great
idea, doesn’t it? 2 Million comics, man,
that’s a lot! Except, if I’m reading the statistics correctly that
I found here,
there are some 45 million students in “Jeez, Brian, why are you complaining? 1%, 2%, whatever! Even if one kid gets turned on to comics, then this is a good thing!” And, yep, I’ll grant that in a second. The problem comes from: “How do we capitalize upon this?” Because it’s not reaching all, or even most students, there’s really not much that any individual retailer can (or should!) do to work themselves into this promotion. I have no idea if any copies are being distributed in the San Francisco Unified School District – and without that data, there’s really nothing I can do to leverage this into anything useful. When I hear about this kind of thing, I always flash back to when the now-defunct Malibu comics launched their Ultraverse line. They had a million dollar campaign to do bus and construction site advertisements. That’s terrific, right? They even made San Francisco one of the cities with the ads. Except they didn’t bother to tell any stores about where the ads ran. I found out that San Francisco was part of it when I was downtown, and saw the ads myself. By that point, it was too late to do anything about it. By the time I could have reacted, the campaign was over. There’s not space in this column to get into any kind of heavy analysis of how advertising works. Based on my experiments with local advertising, it isn’t the best use of “bang for the buck”, but let me suggest that if advertising does in fact work, it’s generally based on brand. Everyone buys toothpaste. People are going to buy toothpaste as a matter of course, and there are hundreds of thousands of locations nation-wide where one can purchase toothpaste. And, so, you can maybe influence them as to what brand of toothpaste they might want. When you see advertising, the overwhelming majority of it is for things that everyone uses: toothpaste, soap, detergent, cars, airlines, beer, whatever. Things that not only everyone uses, but that are “easy” to buy. Even if you’ve never shopped for a car, you probably know what at least some of your options are to purchase them – most communities have an “auto row” or the equivalent. This doesn’t exactly work for comics, however. Comics aren’t a good that everyone uses (though they should!), and they certainly aren’t ubiquitous in sales locations any longer. When the newsstands still carried a large number of comics, maybe general comics advertising made sense – when I was a kid growing up in Brooklyn, I can think of 6 stores within walking distance of my house I could have bought some comics. Not today, however. Even
if you count every bookstore in We often bandy about a “Got Comics?” campaign as though it was the greatest goal we could have. Well, besides the fact that it wouldn’t work for the reason stated above, let’s not forget that “Got Milk?” like “Beef, it’s what for dinner” and “It’s the cheese” and “Llamas: lip smacking good!” are paid for by the farmers through federally-mandated “assessments” – dairy producers must pay these “Got Milk?” assessments even if they see no benefit from the ads, or don’t produce fluid milk! Yikes. Trust me, we don’t want anything even slightly like that for comics. Finally, as far as I can tell from looking for statistics, rather than reading press releases, “Got Milk?” doesn’t appear to work – overall milk sales look to be flat or declining despite astonishing market awareness of the slogan. Comics have some other problems when it comes to advertising – reading is, perforce, a solitary experience, and comics largely look dead and static on television. We’re really much better suited for print advertising because the nature of our product. Advertising comics can work, I think, but it needs to be regional, and focused on driving customers to specific locations. That’s really key because as much as I appreciate the Comic Shop Locator that Diamond runs or Mark Adam’s The Master List, you’re running only mediocre odds that you’ll find a comic shop in your community, and that it will be any good whatsoever. Sending a “civilian” to a bad shop is frankly much worse than sending them to no shop at all. Further, by sending them to specific locations, you can “ensure” that the material advertised is actually in stock – otherwise the demand you’re generating can’t be filled. My suspicion is that any increase in sales for Tokyopop in general, or the specific books they’re advertising during their television campaign will not be directly traceable to the advertisements themselves. Hopefully we’ll have a clear picture of this when I look again at the Bookscan numbers in January. I very much hope that I’m wrong, and these efforts will work amazingly, spurring new and real demand for comics – but I don’t think they will because they’re too diffuse and they’re ignoring the same supply-side problems that comics have had for the last two decades. * * * I fear another market crash is barreling down upon us. Crashes are caused by greed. Sometimes this greed comes from the retailer’s side – the Black & white boom and bust of the 80s was largely a function of retailers trying to sell people “the next Turtles” (Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, that is) – and sometimes it comes from the publishers – an entire nasty chain of dominoes was knocked down with Marvel’s purchase of Heroes World distribution way back in December of ’94. We’re still feeling the effects of that one. Crashes come because there is too much product in the pipeline. Ultimately, there’s a limit not only on how much quality material can actually be produced, but also on how much of it the audience is able to consume. You’re not ATM machines, after all! There are a couple of gluts springing up around us. Obviously, there’s the developing manga glut – sorry, there’s just no way any segment of the American market is going to be able to comfortably absorb 1000+ manga releases a year – but there’s also the more general trade paperback glut that’s been largely hidden in the midst of the manga explosion. While the book is the key to long-term economic stability, there are clearly too many being produced right now, and few, if any, are being supported or managed in any kind of rational way. It looks to me that we’re just about to start edging back into... well, what to call it? “Market share glut” maybe? The absolutely irrational battle for the “top spots” on the sales charts. Variant covers, ill-advised line expansions, line-wide crossovers – all of this and more seem to be the watchwords for ’04 and ’05 as Marvel and DC “fight” for the “number one position” rather than build and grow their overall line quality. I swear there are days I think it is 1993 all over again. Any of this individually probably wouldn’t be much of a problem – markets correct themselves all of the time, after all – but all thrown together, I think it is going to mean a bunch of stores closing down because they won’t be able to manage inventory properly. The Direct Market sure doesn’t need more stores closing down around now. The crazy part of it all is that we lived through 1993 once already, and while I understand that there are a lot of “new” people in power, who don’t have their own direct experience with this kind of thing, surely there are some people in place at each of the companies who are screaming, “No, wait, put on the brakes – we can’t do this again!” One of the many ways that I smell ’93 all over again is the recent moves towards more variant covers. Variant covers are a horrible idea in virtually all circumstances. As best as I can recall, variants in comics stem from Legends of the Dark Knight #1 when DC got in the initial order figures on the book and went “Um, these are ridiculously high – there’s no way the market can sell all of these”, or so, at least, the story goes. They slapped the extra colored outer cover on the book to make sure that sell-through was high enough so that stores wouldn’t go out of business. (“Sell-in” is how many copies ship to the comic shops – what you see reported on the Diamond charts. “Sell-through” is how many copies sell to actual consumers. These are always different numbers, but there’s no mechanism in place to track sell-through at all. Because Direct Market retailers buy non-returnable, if the difference between these two figures is too wide, stores can get into trouble) See, the problem with pre-announced variants is that they ultimately increase the risk to Direct Market retailers without giving any significant advantages. Let’s take a specific example to really illustrate this point: Astonishing X-Men #1. The first variant cover for AstX is tied to orders of a number of other X-titles. Retailers get one variant for every 10 copies of the lowest order of four titles: AstX #1, New X-Men: Academy X #1, Uncanny X-Men #444 and X-Men #157. Now, obviously, each store is going to have their own calculations of what and how to order, but for Comix Experience, I figure I have about a dozen customers who are interested in the variant, and we’re ordering this pack of books like so: 150 AstX #1 60 UnX #444 50 X-Men #157 30 NXAX #1 Because NXAX #1 is our lowest order (And, note, I ordered nearly 200% of what the most recent issue of New Mutants sold – the title NXAX is morphing from) at 30 copies, we qualify for a grand total of three copies of the AstX #1 variant. I can’t possibly make anyone happy in any sort of a fair manner with a lousy three copies of a variant cover. No matter how I choose to distribute them, I’m going to piss some customer off, or make another think I’m rooking them. And that’s not the business I am in. I have no desire to piss any customer off – not even the speculators. In fact, I deeply resent being put into a position where I can’t treat my customers equally. Basically, what Marvel is asking is that retailers up their orders on the other titles to the level of AstX #1. That’s not especially practical considering AstX #1 is Joss Whedon’s debut – and I think the read of the entire market is that Whedon on X-Men holds the potential to bring a lot of new readers into stores. Picture, if you will, a rabid and devoted Buffy and Angel fan who, for whatever reason, just has never gotten into comics before. She hears Joss himself is going to be writing a comic and decides that it’s time to finally check them out. She dutifully tracks the release date on the ‘net, and goes into the comic book store on the release date, and sees there, on the wall Astonishing X-Men #1 for $50-100. Now, sure, that’s the variant; and absolutely that’s going to be about its market value (It will cost your average retailer roughly $50 wholesale per copy, after all), but what is this new consumer going to think? Yup: “Comics look like some sort of scam” Variants only have one real goal – don’t fool yourself into thinking this is some wonderful paean to “consumer choice” – publishers want you to buy more than one copy of their comic. This is, of course, their right. Some might even say, in a capitalistic society, it is their duty. Indeed, the main defense publishers give to variants is “They uniformly sell more copies”, and so they do. But I guess I’m of Hippocratic thought on this: “First thing, do no harm” Variants harm. They skew retailer’s cycle sheets and increase risk on later issues. They send the wrong messages to readers. Each and every one of them runs the risk of being “the straw” that causes a collector to quit the hobby, forever. I’ve been selling comic books my entire adult life, and I can assure you that there is lasting and long-term harm in promoting “collectibility” over content. And all of this is in service of what? The number one spot on the sales charts? Why do you care about that? Quick, someone, anyone, tell me without looking it up, what the top selling book of April 2002! No, no one remembers because it’s just not a meaningful fact. The only thing that actually mattered about Transformers: Generation One #1 was, “was it any good?” (Parenthetically, Transformers: G1 sales have dropped to almost 1/3 of launch numbers – latest issue seems to be around 41k, compared to the 121k launch. Make of that what you will) Our business is, as Larry Marder once said, is to sell Habitual Serial Fiction. Anything that we do that works, in any measure, to Break the Habit, is against our best interests. We’ve been down this road before, people, and it leads nowhere good. ******* Brian Hibbs has owned and operated Comix Experience in San Francisco since 1989. Feel free to e-mail him with any comments. You can also purchase a collection of the first one hundred Tilting at Windmills (originally serialized in Comics Retailer magazine) from IDW Publishing. An index of Tilting at Windmills on Newsarama can be found right here. Click here
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