A Call For Better Advance Awareness
Posted by: CalAggie in Commentary, tags: advertising, Anime, Commentary, Manga, marketing
Chris Beveridge posted a complaint Monday about the lackluster marketing and solicitation efforts of ADV Films and FUNimation to the broader non-hardcore audience. I personally haven’t had as bad a problem with on-box descriptions but I’ve had more of an issue with minimalistic ads, such as the above from the June issue of PiQ that I got in the mail late last week.
At first, I was like “what the hell is Shattered Angels?” and the one-line copy - “Why Choose?” - wasn’t helping me understand what the hell they were trying to advertise. It took a quick search engine query to divine that Shattered Angels is actually Kyoshiro to Towa no Sora under another name. (I later noticed that the image credit mentioned the production committee in the lower left corner but tiny, grey text on a white background is not very readable to the average eye.)
In the same magazine issue, there was an ad for the manga Steel Fist Riku that at least gives me a sense of what it is about and what it looks like. By reading the solicitation of volume 1, I found out that the main character Riku lives with her adoptive father Rocky and gets in a fight with a “Pig Man” who tries to shake up a local merchant. The skirmish kicks off a chain of events where Rocky is reconnected with his shady past. There also happened to be a seven-page preview in the previous issue that let me get a hang of a fight scene’s pace.
Most of the time I walk down the manga aisles, I have no idea which ones to browse so I pick out something I’ve marginally heard of, or just grab random stuff, and flip through the first parts of them. I would like to have more advance notice of what coming out in the next three months and it’s even worse with anime, save for stuff that I’ve seen while browsing “upcoming” lists. I know that not everything can have the hype of Lucky Star or Gurren Lagann but having some promo flyers in Best Buy or Borders could help, more for the average consumer than for myself and the actively-engaged crowd.
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Interesting, typically the manga aisles I see don’t really have what I want unless it’s an actual comic shop with a josei/seinen shelf (as one can imagine, this is rather rare). Unpopular series are not displayed and you have to order them through your bookstore sometimes.
On the other hand, there are news websites with lists and information about series, so I would check them and go into the bookstore knowing beforehand what I’m going to buy (partially this is also because of budget restraints).
So ultimately I don’t care about good/bad marketing ;)
PS. The “Shattered Angels” picture is actually rather nice.