Forgive me for being on a comic books bent here but, well, it’s my weblog and it’s supposed to be about things I like, right?
Anyway, Marvel’s doing a clever job of promoting themselves lately. Here’s a press release of sorts about their New Civil War Trailer. The trailer itself is a Ken Burns Effect style montage of images from the first issue along with some taglines. What’s clever is this:
The new trailer features the comic shop locator info, Civil War Checklist and will be available through Marvel.com as well as Youtube.com so you can share it with friends, post it on your MySpace page, or simply just watch it over and over.
They’re using Youtube to host the video. Cllearly Marvel’s web team could roll its own video player, but they’re hoping to get some cred from Youtube’s popularity, and they want to encourage people to spread it on the MySpace that’s so popular with the kids these days. I like it. They’re saying, “we’re proud of our product. We’re going to advertise it, but we’re hoping that our audience likes this book enough to do the viral stuff, too.” To top it off, they include info on the Comic Shop Locator Service to make it easy to go buy it.
And, at least according to this most-likely biased but nonetheless true release, it’s working. Whether it’ll live up to the hype the Mark Millar set for himself and change everything in comics forever is yet to be seen, but I’m impressed with how Marvel has handled the fans, the mainstream press, and the internet potential so far.