Comics Marketing: Don’t Advertise What’s Not Yours. Especially if it’s Batman.

Crystal Fractal Comics (which is located, counter-intuitively, at crystalfractals.com and not crystalfractalcomics.com) is a small publisher of superhero comics located in Toronto. They, like a couple-dozen other comics companies (cf Platinum Studios) that have cropped up in the last few years or so, are “seeking to diversify the industry through the dynamic storylines and characters of its titles.”

Apparently, they include Batman among those characters:

The graphic on that sidebar there doesn’t act like an ad on the web should: there’s no way to click through to get more information about The Dark Knight, so why’s it there? Here’s three theories.

• They want people visiting the site to go “Oh, these people are involved in licensing comics properties! Properties like Batman! Maybe they can get me Aquaman!”
  
• Similarly: “Batman endorses them! I trust Batman! I will do business with these people!”
  
• Crystal Fractal Comics offers advertising space on their site and they slapped a graphic in that spot as a placeholder. However, instead of sticking in an ad for said space, they thought The Dark Knight would look nicer there.

I suspect the third, which is the most innocuous choice, but I’m of the attitude that smaller publishers benefit very little by having ads for other companies or products on their site: they likely don’t get the traffic that could command a high enough rate for it to make any real difference in their finances, and their brand impression becomes muddled right off the bat. Someone like me (and likely the sort of person who buys up superheroes and the like for the screen) thinks that if a publisher can’t afford the $12-20 a month that hosting a website like that would cost without throwing ads on their front page, then maybe they shouldn’t be in the game to begin with.

(A side note: If you’ve been to the Marvel Comics site, you might have seen what is an amusing phenomenon: DC animated projects advertised on the site’s homepage, likely through a mass media buy done through Warner Brothers. Right now, Heroes (a Universal property) is sponsoring episodes of X-Men: Evolution on the Marvel site, and the comics related to that series are published by Warner Brothers, so I suspect that at that point, the money becomes impressive enough to ignore pesky things like brand solidarity. This is probably doubly true since Marvel became its own production house and is looking for better distribution deals for the films.)