Because We're a Bottom-Line Society

I don't know how long the link will be good, but on Tuesday, The Wall Street Journal put an article on product placement in comic books on the free portion of its Website. The piece talks about how Pontiac and Dodge have made product placement deals (combined with other ad buys) with DC and Marvel, respectively. A new DC character, The Rush, will be driving a Pontiac Solstice. I don't know if this means Dodge will be building a a new Spider-Mobile or not.

I wrote about this over at Howling Curmudgeons, but I wanted to mention it here, too. No one likes product placement, although I've got less of a problem if it's inconspicuous (but that sort of defeats the purpose, doesn't it?), but what caught my eye in this article was its suggestion that ad agencies (and since we're an ad-based society, that essentially means popular culture as a whole) are no longer looking at comics as kids' stuff. The audience has grown up (partially because the medium has failed in recruiting new, younger readers, which means it's only a matter of time until comics fans follow the path of Lawrence Welk fans from a previous generation), so the ads that appear in them should grow up, too. Ad agencies are trying to find ways to hit the 20- and 30-something male market, and that's who's currently buying comics (although, admittedly, there aren't a whole lot of them buying comics). There's all kinds of talk in comics circles (which I'm too lazy to look up and link to just now) about what format might sell successfully, with graphic novels seeming to be taking the edge over single issues (because, after all, single issues remind me of kisses; graphic novels remind me of plans). But there's usually always a mention, perhaps winsome in its inattainability, of large magazine-type comic books that would take their inspiration from Vogue or some such and have hundreds of pages of content with more hundreds of pages of ads. That's never been a realistic format because the advertising support was never there, but maybe this trend suggests that's changing.

This story has gotten a fair amount of exposure around the comics blogosphere and beyond, with even Jimmy Kimmel apparently putting together a mock-up of Action Comics #1 with Superman holding a Pontiac Solstice over his head. (The ICv2 story didn't mention whether Kimmel did this while standing on his Pontiac Garage concert stage.) Over at The Great Curve, someone noticed that a panel the WSJ highlighted as an example of Marvel's adding the Nike swoosh as a product placement in a published book didn't actually appear in the published book--it was covered by a caption.

I first saw this story on Tuesday morning when it was still new and someone had sent it to me, but when I asked where they'd seen it, they were cagey in reply, and I didn't have time to find anything more than the first paragraph of the WSJ subscription-only version. I ended up waiting until Wednesday and cribbing the link from other sites for Howling Curmudgeons. I'm still not sure where my correspondent came up with the article originally, but I'm betting it could well have been Galleycat, a blog at mediabistro.com. Which is a good reminder that I should probably be spending more time over there myself.