News Corp to sell 3m Marvel comics as publisher predicts circulation decline will halve this financial year
News Corp Australia has announced its latest major newspaper promotion, vowing to sell more than 3m Marvel comic books over the next fortnight.
The move is just the latest consumer sales promotion initiative, with News Corp previously giving away children’s books, commemorative coins and DVDs at discounted rates in return for buying its newspapers, with the publisher citing the success of the strategy in lessening print circulation declines.
“We are definitely building momentum in this part of our business and off the back of Mr Men, David Attenborough DVDs, our ANZAC coins collection and most recently our Dr Suess books we are pretty proud to launch our newest promotion Marvel comics,” said Damian Eales managing director of metros and regionals for News Corp.
Eales insists News’s ‘tent pole’ promotions on the whole are profitable.
“We expect to sell over 3m Marvel comic books over the two week promotional period. A lot of our newspapers will go into positive circulation (growth) for us. That is typically what happens when we run these promotions.”
“We spend around $1.2m to promote these tentpoles outside of our business – that’s in external media. After you consider the cost of promotion, the cost of the product itself, each promotion typically either breaks even or is net positive whereas once upon a time they were done exclusively for the purpose of improving circulation.”
This latest promotion will see News Corp target the children’s market with the launch the Marvel Ultimate Super Hero Comic Book Collection, a 14-day collection of never-before released comic books involving superheroes including Iron Man, Thor, Spider-Man and Hulk.
The series will launch in Western Australia this Sunday and elsewhere on July 23 and 24 with all the metro mastheads to carry the books. The first one, featuring Spiderman, will be free with the purchase of a newspaper while subsequent comic books will be $2.60 each.
Captain America at a News Corp event.
“Marvel is one of the world’s biggest franchises from an entertainment perspective. It has a very deep heritage in our customer’s minds,” said Eales.
“We think it is an ageless part of the growing up process and appeal to an audience both young and old. This will introduce a whole new generation to comic books with a whole new set of comic books that have never been released in Australia.”
Eales has been a major advocate for the “tentpole” marketing strategy, a tactic ditched under former News Corp CEO Kim Williams but reinstated under his successor Julian Clarke.
Asked about its impact of the promotions the publishing boss said it was a factor in recent decreases in the sales declines of the News Corp tabloids.
“We have done a lot of work with these tentpole promotions across books, DVDs and now comics,” he said. “These are all analogue media but all are incredibly popular.
“What we have found is that the more of this activity we do the more successful they are. We have really trained our customers to expect incredible value when we do these promotions and as part of it we encourage a lot of people who don’t always buy newspapers to change their habits.
“Over the last two years the rate of circulation decline has basically halved and we see that that momentum will continue into next year and believe it will go close to halving again in this next financial year.”
Asked if he believed the sales promotions were the major driver of the lessening print declines Eales responded: “It is due to a raft of different initiatives. This is one but it is a significant one.
“We have done a lot of work in rebuilding our promotional capability in terms of the printed product. We have also rebuilt our promotional capability in terms of content marketing and promoting what is in tomorrow’s paper and Sunday’s paper.
“We have also spent a lot of time working with our newsagent partners to provide a better point sale experience. We have been introducing bundling offers in newsagencies, convenience stores and supermarkets.
“There have been a raft of activity on the consumer side of our business. We still sell almost 1.2m newspapers every day of the week. It is in an incredibly high volume FMCG product that requires a level of supply chain and retail promotional discipline that you would expect in other retail businesses.”
While other newspapers have abandoned such sales promotions Eales insisted it was still a profitable program.
“This program as a whole is a very profitable component of our business today,” said Eales. “This is part of our overall consumer revenue growth story. Last financial year across the metros and The Australian we had more customers paying more money for content than ever before.
“That comes from slowing the declines in circulation and rapidly growing our digital subscriptions. We are investing in creating an engaged audience of customers who pay money every day to consume the content.”
Over the past few decades the entertainment world has made big money out of the interest in comics. While this has been going on the newspaper industry has been down grading the comic section in the papers. Obviously nobody running newspapers have noticed what has been going on.
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If the strategy results in artificially inflated circulation figures – people buying the paper for the giveaway product but not actually reading the paper or responding to any of the advertisers – then the strategy is flawed and will ultimately fail
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Artificially inflating circulation figures as people buy multiple copies of the paper, or only purchase the paper to receive the offer, does nothing for the advertisers in that issue. Promotions of this nature are designed for one thing only, positive spin upon declining circulation. Newspaper has failed to change and become relevant in today’s media landscape, and their current dedication to toys with “Happy Meal” circulation is not changing their declining circulation and relevance.
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Considering the image of the children contains 5 out of 7 dressed up as DC comic book characters and only 2 Marvel characters , I doubt that Eales’ launch team have done their research properly!
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What a disgrace! Placing AMERICAN comics in our Australian newspapers. Support AUSTRALIAN comics that are struggling to get the local message heard!
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Congratulations.
Managed to halve the rate of decline in circulation in the past two years. * Translation: Going down the gurgle a little slower.
I might just add that sort of thing to my CV.
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