Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.
Rocket your D&D 5E and Level Up: Advanced 5E games into space! Alpha Star Magazine Is Launching... Right Now!

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Samothdm" data-source="post: 2139894" data-attributes="member: 5473">I was thinking this could be a good idea, too.  The thing is, though, an infomercial about D&D would really be more about "This is what a role-playing game is."  Not that that's bad, but basically it becomes Hasbro/WotC spending the money to educate people and create a market for RPGs.  Once someone's been exposed to the RPG concept, they could just as easily be torn away from D&D and end up playing "World of Darkness", "Rifts", or any of the other multitude of RPGs out there.  Of course the commercial would be branding as WotC and D&D and all that, and the idea would be that the key take-away would be "D&D is a cool game!  I have to go out and buy D&D and start playing!".  But, first you have to get people to understand what D&D is at its core (ie, a role-playing game).If someone is already familiar with the RPG concept but they're not currently playing D&D, I'm not sure an infomercial is going to switch them over.  You're thinking along the right lines here.  If D&D were going to advertise on television, the most obvious place would be on select cable networks whose audiences would have a larger percentage of D&D's core target market.  The problem with this again, though, is that national cable advertising is still very expensive, and no matter how you slice and dice the ratings  data of the network, you're also going to end up with a larger portion of the network's audience that doesn't (or wouldn't) play D&D.  Those are "wasted" impressions, but you pay for them anyway.  The cable networks charge you based on their total audience, not just for the portion that you want to reach.Also, when you say the "sales of the books that come out in that month" I'm assuming that you're talking about the D&D RPG rulebooks and supplements and not the novels (fiction).  If you're talking the RPG stuff, I'm pretty sure that the incremental sales they might get from advertising on cable would not come anywhere close to breaking even for the expense of producing the ad and then running the commercial.  That's why WotC has adopted a strategy of just advertising their new material to the people that they already know are playing the game - readers of Dragon and [/i]Dungeon[/i], for example.  There are no "wasted impressions" that way.  **Something they could think about it doing promotional tie-ins with mass online stores like Amazon and Barnes and Noble.  When D&D 3.0E came out, I remember reading statistics about how the Player's Handbook was on the Amazon Top Items list or whatever.  What if everyone who bought the Player's Handbook on Amazon got a coupon for $5 off the next supplement book that WotC published, via a special e-mail to the purchaser sent from Amazon?  Then, after they use their $5 coupon to buy the book, they are given an offer to sign up for some kind of D&D online club sponsored by WotC and Amazon.  They'll get special e-mails sent to them talking about new products coming up, coupons, maybe PDF previews, invitations to Organized Play events in their area, and stuff like that.  Getting people involved like this would help migrate someone from just being a casual purchaser of the Player's Handbook and help pave the way for turning the person into a regular gamer.</blockquote>

Verification