Advertising/Marketing for D&D/d20

[ajanders]

WotC/D20 advertising

I suspect WOTC will wait until D20 Modern to do a lot of mainstream advertising.
D&D is a sword and sorcery genre game. Sword and sorcery is a very small part of common culture: many people can't identify with Regdar the fighter, Elminster, or Drizzt.
But D20 modern allows people to play whole new sorts of games: some of which are hugely popular compared with sword and sorcery fantasy.
You can do mysteries:start with the Hardy Boys, continue on with Phillip Marlowe, and round out with Susan Grafton's alphabet mystery series.
You can do adventure/suspense: Indiana Jones, Tom Clancy, James Bond, Jackie Chan, or John Grisham.
You can do low-supernatural horror: Cujo, Silence of the Lambs, or The Bone Collector.
Even the new pulps play well with D20: like Mack Bolan and the Stony Man Group.

I suspect the mainstream is far more interested in being James Bond, Perry Mason, and Jack Ryan, than Conan the Barbarian, so that's the kind of thing that needs to go to mainstream publications.

 

[Pramas]

Re: WotC/D20 advertising

I suspect WOTC will wait until D20 Modern to do a lot of mainstream advertising.

I doubt it. Leaving aside the relative merits of the products involved, the fact is that the environment at WotC has changed. The money for a mainstream advertising campaign just isn't there anymore.

You have to remember that 3E was given a huge marketing budget. How huge? Well, one part of the marketing plan was the D&D College Tour. This was a whole caravan that brought a big tent to a bunch of midwestern colleges, ran demos, had folks in costume, and so on. The budget for the College Tour alone was five times the marketing budget for Chainmail for one entire year.

Think Hasbro is going to spend money like that again on roleplaying games? I sure don't.

 

[DSC-EricPrice]

I'll chime in as one of the little guys who doesnt have a lot of money to spend on advertising.

Ads are expensive. Even ads in Dungeon or Dragon CAN run $1000 or more. For small d20 publishers like myself even this is often considered unattainable. Perhaps a few of the smaller d20 companies will get together and so a single page ad covering several products as a way to save money and yet still get the word out about their products.

That said and at the risk of giving out what I would consider to be a pretty big secret, I suggest every small d20 publisher consider the
Role Playing Tips newsletter as a good advertising venue. Johnn Four administers the newsletter. It comes out every Monday with fresh material for DMs. As I remember, he puts two paid advertisements in a week. The last time we bought some they were $60 each.

$60 to reach over 10,000 "highly qualified" potential customers is a good value no matter how you slice it. We've enjoyed measurable success with every ad we put in. The results are noticable and quantifiable. More importantly, sales as a result of the ads far and above exceed the initial price tag of the ad.

 

[Churchill]

Realms of Fantasy

I was looking through the August issue of Realms of Fantasy (boy, I hope I've got that title right) magazine yesterday and saw a WotC D&D ad. Nice full-page full-color thing. That was a pleasant surprise. And it seems a sensible thing to do; the audience - given that it's a fantasy oriented fiction mag - is a good potential market.

Samothdm... I'm not sure what computer game it was. I think it may have been Baldur's Gate, but I'm not positive. If it wasn't that one specifically, it was something very similar.

 

[Cergorach]

Ads are expensive. Even ads in Dungeon or Dragon CAN run $1000 or more.

Is it just me or is that rather cheap? (is this quote accurate and is it for a full page 4-color add?)

What would a comparable add in something like pc-gamer cost and how many of the things get printed?

Expecting WotC to take responsibility for aquiring new D&D players (and in turn new D20 recruits) is like hoping the sun will not shine at night. Look at the current climate at WotC, they only want to see beans *grins*...

 

[Jim Butler]

Re: Realms of Fantasy

Samothdm... I'm not sure what computer game it was. I think it may have been Baldur's Gate, but I'm not positive. If it wasn't that one specifically, it was something very similar.

It was Pools of Radiance (SSI). We worked out a deal with them so that their special edition of the game included a copy of the PHB.

 

[DMFTodd]

I'm another little guy looking for a way to get the word out.

RoleplayingTips has worked well for me also. It's a little blurb ad, text only, but it hits 10,000+ DMs for a reasonable cost.

Banner ad at ENWorld managed to generate a lot of traffic as well for me.

Another thing that I hear works well is to advertise in the newsletter I send to my customers This newsletter goes out to 1500+ DM's. All I ask in exchange is for $20 worth of product that I then raffle off to my subscribers. So you get an ad announcing the raffle and another ad when I announce the winner of the raffle. You get to hit 1500+ DM's twice for very, very little cost. This seems to have worked well for a variety of publishers.

 

[Samothdm]

Is it just me or is that rather cheap? (is this quote accurate and is it for a full page 4-color add?)

Current Dragon Circulation:
55,228 (that's a 6-month average)
Cost for a Full Page, Four-Color Ad:
$2,975 Gross (includes agency commission).
CPM (Cost-Per-Thousand, or the cost to reach 1,000 People):
$53.87.

What would a comparable add in something like pc-gamer cost and how many of the things get printed?

Current PC Gamer Circulation:
361,856 (does not include 10,828 in non-paid copies distributed)
Cost for a Full Page, Four-Color Ad: $13,230
CPM (Cost-Per-Thousand):
$36.56

Keep in mind that these rates are "open" (meaning, non-negotiated). Most advertisers will pay a little less. Specifically, see Jesse Decker's comments in another thread on Dragon Magazine here.

What this shows us, though, is that Dragon is less expensive from an "out-of-pocket" cash standpoint, but PC Gamer is more efficient (meaning that its cost to reach 1,000 people is less than Dragon's). Media geek talk.

Of course, most d20 companies probably don't have $13,230 laying around to spend in PC Gamer.

 

[Cergorach]

Thanks Samothdm! That info is really appreciated!
3k is pretty expensive for an add, 13k even more so. Although the PCgamer would reach more people for less cost, i think that Dragon constitutes for a higher percentage of target audience. For a D20 publisher it's still suicidal to spend 13k on add space in such a magazine (maybe the Everquest RPG would benefit from PCGamer). 3k is a risk, but you do get 55k people who see your add and are probably your target audience...

Interesting, very interesting...
*takes notes and archives it for future reference*

 

[Samothdm]

Although the PCgamer would reach more people for less cost, i think that Dragon constitutes for a higher percentage of target audience.

I absolutely agree. That's the trick to media planning - how do you figure out the percent of PC Gamer's audience that is part of your target audience? Obviously some percentage of them are never going to play tabletop RPGs.

OTOH, there are some people reading PC Gamer that are probably in the "consideration set" of playing a tabletop RPG and aren't currently reading Dragon, so they wouldn't be exposed to the D&D message if they didn't see an ad in PC Gamer.

This is a simplistic view, but it's what I do every day for my career - trying to figure out how to reach the right people at the right cost with the right amount of "weight" (insertions or TV spots or whatever). Sometimes, it's actually fun!

Again, if any d20 (or potential d20) publishers have any general questions they'd like to ask, you can e-mail me at samothdm@yahoo.com. Just make sure to mention "Advertising" or "Marketing" in the subject.