Best of 2006: Marketing
Marketing is such a huge deal in comics today that the way a series or event is marketing can determine whether it succeeds or fails regardless of the quality of the story. A bad series can succeed if it’s marketed correctly, and a good series can get canceled if the company isn’t behind it. Here’s the best way to get the attention of a member of the Legion of Doom.
Civil War
“Marvel’s Civil War marketing. It got a lot of mainstream attention and they’ve pulled in a lot of mainstream ads in the Civil War books.”
-Jim Doom
“I suppose I have to give this to Civil War, which claimed serious mainstream media attention for Marvel through shrewd timing. Of course, the series is also exploitative on a whole lot of levels, but that doesn’t really matter, right?”
-Jean-Claude Van Doom
Keep It Simple
“The best marketing is stuff like Joe’s Fridays and the preview art. It really gives the fans what they want.”
-Doominator
One Year Later
“Launching each of its titles one year into the future was a bold choice for DC. Surely it screwed up a lot of long-term plans writers had laid out. If I was a long-time reader of those titles, I’d certainly be miffed. But in the process, DC created the absolute perfect jumping on point for every single one of its titles. And jump I did.”
-Fin Fang Doom
Something I forgot to mention, which was illustrated beautifully by the visual aide in this post, was how Marvel’s Civil War branding made it instantly possible to recognize which titles to grab from the colorful mess that is a wall of new comics.
Good point about the visuals. I should have spelled it out above, but Marvel used good timing to overwhelm the New York Comic Con with news of Civil War, stealing headlines in the media center of the country. It was a smart move that paid dividends.
But, as we’ve seen, Civil War has seen a pretty serious drop off in readers, while 52 seems to be hanging pretty steady lately.
That’s actually opposite of what’s happening, JCVD. Civil War’s readership is actually higher than it was at issue #1, and 52’s has fallen off.
Because I am bored and have nothing better to do, I charted them out below, with each line indicating the issue number, its relative rank in its monthly sales chart, and the sales figures.
As you can see, 52 has never again come close to its issue #1 sales, instead fluctuating between 100k-120k, while only issue #2 of Civil War has sold less than issue #1. It’s pretty uncommon for a big event series to actually continue outselling issue #1 as months go by, particularly with the much-maligned delays.
Civil War has also come in first every month, out-selling 2nd place by at least 100,000 copies each time, with the one exception of its first month, when it went up against Infinite Crisis #7 (outselling that by 60k+). It out-sells its runner-up by almost as many copies as that runner-up sells. I call that a huge success.
Civil War 1 (1 May) – 260,804
Civil War 2 (1 June) – 253,856
Civil War 3 (1 July) – 290,709
Civil War 4 (1 Sep) – 272,573
Civil War 5 (1 Nov) – 272,603
52 Week 1 (4 May) – 140,971
52 Week 2 (6 May) – 128,393
52 Week 3 (7 May) – 123,982
52 Week 4 (9 May) – 121,440
52 Week 5 (11 June) – 111,895
52 Week 6 (15 June) – 110,028
52 Week 7 (13 June) – 110,188
52 Week 8 (16 June) – 105,107
52 Week 9 (13 July) – 102,142
52 Week 10 (14 July) – 100,779
52 Week 11 (4 July) – 122,016
52 Week 12 (16 July) – 98,667
52 Week 13 (5 Aug) – 119,507
52 Week 14 (7 Aug) – 118,259
52 Week 15 (6 Aug) – 119,411
52 Week 16 (8 Aug) – 117,472
52 Week 17 (9 Aug) – 116,637
52 Week 18 (6 Sep) – 111,830
52 Week 19 (7 Sep) – 111,611
52 Week 20 (8 Sep) – 111,099
52 Week 21 (9 Sep) – 110,350
52 Week 22 (2 Oct) – 108,624
52 Week 23 (3 Oct) – 107,962
52 Week 24 (4 Oct) – 107,413
52 Week 25 (6 Oct) – 106,332
52 Week 26 (6 Oct) – 104,614
52 Week 27 (7 Oct) – 104,265
52 Week 28 (8 Oct) – 103,529
52 Week 29 (10 Oct) – 102,699
52 Week 30 (11 Oct) – 102,576
There I go for paraphrasing a Lying in the Gutters column.
PS – 52 has been pretty steady aside from the expected slide after the first issue. I wouldn’t consider what’s happened lately to be a serious drop off.
What I’m interested to see is whether it gets a boost from now to the finish line.
PPS – I definitely overstated it, but Civil War has lost readers. While it’s still obviously a success, both critically and commercially it hit its peak a few months back.
PPPS – I swear this is the last thing, but I would wager a guess that DC is pretty satisfied with 52’s numbers. Seeing as it’s a weekly title, that takes a much higher level of dedication from readers to follow it.
I would imagine that the 105,000 folks who consistently read it do so because they’re DC die hards, completists or they’re just really engaged in the story.
For Civil War, since issue 4 we’ve seen at least close to half of fan feedback turn negative (and that seems a conservative estimate to me), but it’s a lot easier on the wallet to finish out a 7-issue series, even if you just want to rag on it on the Internet, than it is to buy another 20 issues.
From LITG:
Paul O’Brien/Milton Griepp sales estimates (while not totally accurate and ignore non-USA sales and news stand, but do include reorders, they are at least comparable month-to-month) tell a different story.
CIVIL WAR #1 357,601
CIVIL WAR #2 339,527
CIVIL WAR #3 330,304
CIVIL WAR #4 280,508
CIVIL WAR #5 272,603
I’m sure DC is just fine with 52’s numbers, because they’re at very worst up to par with what the top 25 books are doing these days. I was just responding to the assertion that Civil War was tumbling while 52 wasn’t. I think 52’s patterns are to be expected. And if Rich Johnston has to find some other sales tallies to conclude that Civil War is a flop selling 272,603 copies at $3.99 a pop, more power to him. He also can’t stop laughing at and plugging Civil Wardrobe.
Neither he, nor I, called it a flop. Just that it had fallen off some.
I mis-paraphrased “pretty serious drop-off.”