Samothdm said:
As far as acquiring new players outside of core tabletop RPG players, I was thinking that an exception to what you said might be the new EverQuest d20 RPG by S&SS.
If they took every penny they might spend on advertising and instead sunk it into a deal with GameStop and Wal*Mart for an attractive endcap near the front of the store and some quick salespeson training, they'd get a thousandfold return vs. what they'd get for advertising in a computer gaming magazine. They'd be even better off to try and work out a deal with Sony to put an EQ RPG splash page on the logon screen. Or, since Sony has the billing addresses for every single player in the game, to do a targeted mass mailing to a selected subset of the EQ user community based on demographic analysis.
The data is pretty clear: The comptuer gaming press is so overwhelmed with flashy graphics and up-to-the-minute release information that the ROI of advertising in it for anything but computer software just doesn't exist.
The hobby gaming press is good for two things: 1 - it tells retailers a publisher is "serious" about a product. I know a lot of retailers who won't stock a small press product without an ad in Dragon magazine. That ad is a litmus test. For larger more established publishers, ads in the hobby gaming press are what I call "come and get 'em" ads. They are primarily useful to people who have already heard about a product through another venue as a way of saying "you want this, and now its available - come to your local game store and buy it." 2- it tells the 10% of the market who are rabid buyers of anything related to their favorite hobby or genre that a new product is on the way, and that can start the cycle of awareness building that's driven by the fan community via web sites, internet posts, game store conversation and t-shirt wearing.
In the extraordinarily rare case of a product that isn't what it seems and needs to build awareness, the hobby gaming press can be effective - especially if combined with editorial content. However, most of the companies that might benefit from that kind of advertising don't have the ability or the know-how to execute on the strategy and the ads they produce don't achieve that objective.
The problem with advertising as a marketing vehicle for non-acquisition products is that it is a passive medium, whereas sales to hobby gamers requires active intervention. I could go on at some length about the psychology of the gamer, or the ecology of the retail store, but I'll just sum it all up by saying that essentially everyone who reads a hobby gaming magazine has already "saturated" their available dollars for the hobby. Getting them to buy something
other than what they're already planning to buy requires a direct personal contact of some kind to shift those dollars.
The problem with advertising as a marketing vehicle for acquisition products for fantsy roleplaying games in general is that the target for acquisition is 12 year old boys who live in suburbs, are in the top quartile of household income, and who have an interest in math, science, literature and history. In other words, one of the most advertising-saturated demographics on the planet. Breaking through the clutter of mult- million dollar advertising campaigns is essentially impossible. A really great TV campaign might do it (especially if coupled with some kind of TV show), but the resources to mount such a beast aren't available.
But, as far as creating brand awareness, advertising can do a great job. So, let's say that someone is trying the direct one-on-one approach to get a friend to play. Would that friend be more "receptive" if he or she has seen an ad for the game in one of his/her favorite magazines? I'd say "yes".
I'd say "the power of a friend offering to play a game with me so overwhelms any other marketing message I may have heard that the offer itself becomes the most meaningful part of the interaction". If I can get the offer made, I can save the money on the advertising. So I'd rather spend money on marketing programs that are likely to make that friend make the offer.
I wanted to make one other point: About Dungeon magazine.
Due to it's unique nature (mostly content for DMs, and the other content targeted at the world's largest organized community of tabletop RPG players), Dungeon is probably the best dollar-for-dollar advertising vehicle in the industry for most kinds of tabletop RPG products (which, due to their nature, are almost all aimed at GMs).
If I was told that I could only advertise a tabletop RPG product in one venue, my choice would be Dungeon magazine every single time. There's two segments in tabletop RPG purchasers: Those who buy about $300 lifetime, and those who buy about $2,500 lifetime. Dungeon directly (and essentially exclusively) targets the $2,500 lifetime buyers.
The ads are still mostly "come and get 'em" ads, but at least the target market is narrow enough to generate a good ROI on those ads.
Ryan
Ryan
