DOES TRADITIONAL ADVERTISING WORK?

How do we Turn Our Indie Animation into Cold, Hard Cash?
Part IV

It was November 2001. Westwood Studios, the famous video game house where I worked at the time, was in dire straits. Grumblings were in the air that the end was very near. It was only a matter of time. I was among the first batch to be laid off. When I was told, my supervisors wondered why I didn't seem phased. I wasn't shocked. I wasn't sad. I left with a smile on my face. Part of that was because of the huge severance package given me, but it was also because I had something else.

I had a beautiful full color advertisement in Animation Magazine. I had a DVD of Understanding Chaos, fresh off the presses and ready to sell. I had an order fulfillment company in northern Nevada ready to handle all shipping, returns and even dealing with customers. I had a web store ready to take credit cards orders and notify the shipping house. The entire thing would run automatically without me having to watch over it. I had something to fall back on.

So fall back on it I did, and believe it or not, it worked! I could make a living doing this! Maybe it wasn't a jet setting and exciting living of the rich, but I could make a living! Sure, there were the usual problems. The shipping house makes a mistake, there's a bad disc or two in every batch, but it was actually running smoothly. People would come to the site, order a DVD, emails would notify everyone necessary and the DVD got shipped like clockwork. Still, I made one major mistake.

Animation Magazine is a magazine about the business of animation. The full color ad I spent so much money on got me a lot of press and made me many good contacts, but in reality, in that day the people who would view traditional ads and buy weren't on the internet. They were retail customers. In fact, the people who would be affected by almost any traditional advertising were retail customers, patrons of the brick and mortar store. Luckily, I had a series of banner ads on a wide variety of related web sites that were either very low cost or traded for minor art tasks. Or was this even enough?

Does MacDonald's need to advertise in this day and age? I mean, everyone knows who they are. You see one on every other street corner. They have achieved the height of brand awareness haven't they? So why do they spend millions and millions hawking the same old hamburgers at customers who already know they are there? Because they have to! Otherwise people would just about forget they existed and when they got hungry the first thing to come to mind would be the fast food joints which are flashing ads at them every single commercial break.

I found I had to keep rotating and changing ads at every turn to keep it all alive. Sometimes a banner ad would become old news in as little as a week and I had to change the artwork or find a new approach just to keep people coming. Traditional advertising has its place, but on the internet and with the type of product I was selling it was the wrong choice. It would be even poorer choice today. By the time I got around to doing Shadowskin, my second DVD, I found out that promotion will get you a lot further than advertising.

More on that in the next post...

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