{"id":1066,"date":"2008-07-29T13:37:59","date_gmt":"2008-07-29T20:37:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.alertnerd.com\/?p=1066"},"modified":"2008-07-29T13:37:59","modified_gmt":"2008-07-29T20:37:59","slug":"why-does-dc-suck-at-marketing-pr","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.alertnerd.com\/?p=1066","title":{"rendered":"Why Does DC Suck at Marketing & PR?"},"content":{"rendered":"

I don’t usually try to shit where I eat–that is, I work in PR and marketing for a living (business to business mostly) but I don’t necessarily feel a great urge to dissect the PR and marketing campaigns for the entertainment I shovel into my mouth like so much Laffy Taffy.<\/p>\n

Over the SDCC weekend, though, as I watched the events unfolding from afar, I was overwhelmed with a very specific, very unfortunate sensation, and it’s this:<\/p>\n

DC Comics is doing a piss-poor job at marketing and promoting their product.
\n
\nExcept for when they slink from their building in New York to attend events, I almost never have the sense that there is anyone at DC interested in communicating about upcoming releases with fans. From a big scary corporate perspective, I realize it’s hard to quantify the hard benefits attached to marketing initiatives, in terms of improved sales and increased revenue.<\/p>\n

However, depending on the tools you utilize, smart and savvy marketing these days can be done in such a way that there’s little to no additional cost attached to it, save perhaps the bits of time editors and talent may spend engaging fans through various mediums. There are so many social media applications online right now that it’s almost harder NOT to talk about your work in one of them than it is to actively discuss it.<\/p>\n

Marvel totally GETS this. They are using free and dirt-cheap tools to push their product out through a variety of avenues, in addition to actually springing some cash to put forth cool metaprojects like their MySpace-exclusive Secret Invasion storyline.<\/p>\n

Here’s another example: I was tracking San Diego panels at work last week and at Marvel.com, one of their PR marketing folks, who goes by the handle Agent_M<\/a>, was using a new liveblogging technology to cover all Marvel panels. Thanks to this technology and notifications about it through Twitter, I was able to virtually “attend” these panels, hearing news announcements instantaneously, and even seeing artwork as people at the convention were seeing it in the panel. It was pretty remarkable.<\/p>\n

Contrast that with DC, who posted podcast recordings of panels, which was cool…but I don’t think I even heard about them till well into the con, if not in the days afterward. An okay strategy, but still lacking immediacy, and definitely not pushed out to the fans in anything like a timely or organized fashion.<\/p>\n

As I observe DC’s PR and marketing strategy, I think it’s becoming clear that they have no real PR and marketing strategy. Do fans even know who is the lead person in charge of marketing and PR for the company? Why doesn’t he or she have a MySpace page, a Twitter account, a blog at DCComics.com? Why aren’t there constant e-mail blasts being sent out by DC featuring links to the latest content on the DC site? Why isn’t there any decent content on the DC site, for that matter? Where is the Final Crisis viral marketing tie-in, the blogs from Eddie Bereganza talking about how cool J.G. Jones’ latest pages look, the message board threads at DC’s site where fans can ask Grant Morrison questions about the book?<\/p>\n

As their market share shrinks and they are getting beaten about the face and head by Marvel, why isn’t anyone at DC Comics looking into these cost-effective, leading-edge ways to SELL GODDAMNED COMIC BOOKS???<\/p>\n

I wish I knew.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I don’t usually try to shit where I eat–that is, I work in PR and marketing for a living (business to business mostly) but I don’t necessarily feel a great urge to dissect the PR and marketing campaigns for the entertainment I shovel into my mouth like so much Laffy Taffy. Over the SDCC weekend, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,31],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1066","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-comics","category-teh-intarweb"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.alertnerd.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1066","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.alertnerd.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.alertnerd.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.alertnerd.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.alertnerd.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1066"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.alertnerd.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1066\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.alertnerd.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1066"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.alertnerd.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1066"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.alertnerd.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1066"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}