Enough with the silly announcements already!
For those who don’t recognise the above image, its a rearrangement of an image that has sneaked into the background of AnimeonDVD the last few days. Unsurprisingly, it resulted in a lot of confused people wondering what on earth it was about before most people decided that it was probably something to do with Mushishi.
Eventually, intrepid poster Tempy pointed out that some of the bugs were simply silhouettes of official art for The Third, which it ultimately turns out is what the announcement is for. Notice that this is another show being released in the US via Kadokawa and… a mystery partner. I guess they are just keen to try and duplicate the success they’ve had with their Haruhi marketing campaign. The problem is that, well, The Third isn’t Haruhi. Heck, The Third isn’t even Rozen Maiden or Keroro Gunsou – this kind of marketing works for those shows, because they are popular enough already for the mental fans to go crazy over these odd stunts, repeating every news item ad nauseam, thus providing free advertising for them.
The Third, however, simply isn’t a particularly popular show with the kind of people who, well, watch these things before they are licensed. I can’t really see doing licensing announcements like this for every little show they choose to release in the US being a particularly good move in the long run. I mean, in this case, the fact that everyone seemed to think it was Mushishi proves that it kind of backfired on them anyway, but if they continue doing this all they are going to do is bore people with it. When, in the future, they have another show where this kind of approach might actually work, they’ll have bored people so much with the approach that it’ll probably be met with indifference. The novelty factor of it all is wearing off, really.
The fact that I think Matthew has the only other blog post I’ve seen on this news, despite the news breaking last night, really proves exactly how successful this has been for them this time around ^^;
As for the actual show, I’ll probably end up buying it. It’s not something I’ve actually seen, but it sounds like the kind of show I normally enjoy.
2007-02-22
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I agree that doing something special to announce every release no longer makes the gimmick all that special. It makes it run of the mill. For this type of thing to work, you need people who actually want to talk about it. Sure, we’re sort of doing that now, but not in the degree that I would say it was a successful effort. It might get a very slight buzz going for a buzzless show, but is it worth the expense of saddling the next big thing that would benefit from this sort of thing with a feeling of been there done that?
2007-02-22
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At first I thought you meant stop all the lame press releases of “So and so company rocks! Yeahhhhhh!”
And what!? THE THIRD! YESSS THANK YOU THIRDO-SAMA! OH THIRD NO!
2007-02-22
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I was never too gone on these “what have we licensed now?” marketing campaigns, and by now it is just getting too old to care at all- all I want to know is what definitely is licensed and what isn’t.
I had actually intended to blog about this, but it would be part of next Tuesday Rumble- it’s only The Third so there’s hardly any urgency about it.
2007-02-22
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I so agree. It’s getting a bit out of hand. I don’t even know what The Third is about even.
2007-02-23
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thanks for explaining those bugs… they were… oh man, I’m not gonna say it
anyway, these advertising campaigns are dumb, IMO. Why try to sell me something if you’re not gonna tell me what you’re trying to sell? ugh, stupid ad execs! baka baka baka!!
2007-03-06
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[...] Now, whilst this may have been an interesting gimmick to some when it first started, it seems I’m not the only one to be getting thoroughly fed up with it by now. All I care about is what has and hasn’t been [...]