Madison Avenue VILLAINY!

Cover to the Captain America: Secret Empire Trade Paperback, art by Sal Buscema

While paging through the Captain America: Secret Empire trade paperback, I noticed an interesting plot point.

The main focus of the story involves an underground organization called the Secret Empire trying to discredit Captain America as America's #1 hero and replace him with their candidate, Moonstone.

So how does the Secret Empire go about discrediting Cap? They use a Madison Avenue advertising firm. And they choose correctly. The fictional ad firm belonging to Quentin Harderman frames Cap for murder and theft and makes Moonstone a hero for beating the tar out of Cap. And throughout the book, the Madison Avenue suits are only too happy to assist the Secret Empire in taking over America (and eventually, THE WORLD)! In fact, when the frame is revealed to different characters in the story (namely The Falcon, Professor Xavier, and Nick Fury) no one is surprised that Madison Avenue Ad Executives would stoop so low.

So this has me thinking: what evils does advertising have in store for us in the future? Is the marketing of the iPhone and the Snuggee some sort of harbinger for the doom to come?

Is Madison Avenue working against us right now?

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Ecocomic Recession Watch: Spider-Man Edition

Although on real-Earth, GDP might be growing faster than we expected, we are not out of the woods yet. Conversely, the Marvel Universe seems particularly bleak. Superheroes and supervillains alike are struggling to make ends meet. Heroes that aren't endowed with billions of dollars and who might not have solid public support are having trouble funding their weekly adventures. This puts a huge constraint on the amount of crime they could fight. Meanwhile, the ones who deviate from traditional tactics, take advantage of new technologies, and perform cheap stunts in order to propel their popularity are finding unexpected sources of income. Here are some economic indicators from Marvel's New York City (once again, we don't have real indicators like unemployment rates or GDP growth, but we do have anecdotal evidence of how the economy is affecting the daily tasks of heroes, villains, and operations of certain businesses) :

1) Villains are now liveblogging their fights.

Amazing Spider-Man #608 by Marc Guggenheim, Marco Checchetto, Luke Ross and Rick Magyar (2009)

Say what you will about the fickle nature of humanity, but one thing they consistently show interest in is a good performance. Watching real superheroes fight supervillains online, where they are safely insulated from any real harm, is the ultimate reality show. And Screwball here, despite her unfortunate name, seems to be aware of that. 18 million subscribers to her website? Imagine her advertising revenue (although if this is the case, it's curious that she isn't wearing any company logos or patches during her duel with Spider-Man in this issue).

We've discussed many times before how smaller villains need to rely on tactics like these to compete in the marketplace against the well-established elite (and it's not just in the case of villainy). Here's an interesting thought, though--it seems that, particularly in NYC, there has been a resurgence of b-list villains that come equipped with highly original, if not completely ludicrous schemes. Could it be that these villains have started to marginalize the older ones, who more or less rely on the same, traditional techniques? Is this, as Jason Todd had previously described, the iPod taking over the Walkman?

2) Spider-Man is considering using his "brand" to make some extra cash.

Of course, Spidey is just joking about patenting the Spidey-tracers. Or is he? On the one hand, you need to provide proper identification to have a patent. Also, I guess if you want to receive some form of payment for selling Spidey-tracers, you're going to have to need a name on your check. Fortunately, the Marvel Universe has just the mechanism to get around this: Spider-Man could reveal his identity and register with the government through the Superhuman Registration Act of 2006.

My sense is that if Spider-Man really wants to put his name towards making some money, this would be his only option. He obviously can't patent as Peter Parker--he needs the "Spidey" branding. He might have been able to hand off the tracers for mass production to, say, Tony Stark, who would then cut him a share of the profits under-the-table. Of course, Stark Industries is no more, Tony lost his mind (literally), Norman Osborn is running things, and Spider-Man is running low on friends he can trust in high places. But that's even more of an incentive to keep the secret identity. Oh, what to do?

3) The newspaper industry continues to fall more than ever

We have a more detailed post on the economics of the newspaper industry here. The point is the print industry is steadily declining. Part of the recent decline has to due with a reduction in advertising revenue, which has to do with the recession. But a major factor is the overwhelming public reliance on electronic media and technology. As far as I see, the DB is still holding true to its paper roots. But if it doesn't start taking advantage of new media soon, all the Spider-Man photos in the world won't be able to silence its death knell.

Dare I say that the folks at The DB take a lesson from Screwball? Here they are complaining about her liveblog and not one of them mentions perhaps adopting a similar strategy. That combined with Peter Parker's miraculous photography (how does he take all those Spider-Man pictures?) and the company has a chance of bouncing back.

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Spider-Man Makes Another Bad Advertising Choice

We know that Peter Parker is struggling with money. We also know that he's tried advertising before, unsuccessfully. Now, in an effort to alleviate some dire circumstances without tarnishing his reputation in the United States, it appears as though Spidey has joined the ranks of celebrities such as Tommy Lee Jones by lending his name for ads in Asia. Too bad he couldn't escape the blogosphere. Via Comic Mix, the Beat, and failblog here is Spider-Man requesting your presence at a water park...



There has been some mystery as to the meaning behind this ad. Here's my guess: Spider-Man is actually the villain. Using more powerful webbing that emanates from his behind, he's trying to steal the water slides directly from the park and take it back to the United States. The angry patron, however, won't have it.

If you thought the Spidey-mobile was bad, this is infinitely worse. If Peter's so desperate for money and is willing to debase himself, why not go back into the wrestling gig? At the very least, someone should get him a good publicist.

Readers, your thoughts are needed!!

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Should Spider-Man Advertise More?

Update 08/04/2009: Correcting an error that I had written below: the co-author of this study is C. Robert Clark of the Institute of Applied Economics in Montreal, not Robert C. Clark of Harvard University. Incidentally, one of the co-authors of the paper is from Harvard University. Tricky!

"Fight at the Museum" in Amazing Spider-Man #600 by Zeb Wells and Derec Donovan

I've been writing a lot recently about Spider-Man. The reason is that the group of writers who put out The Amazing Spider-Man have recently released a gigantic sized issue, which contains several stories, almost all of which touch upon Peter Parker's struggle to keep himself afloat in the economy.

In one story, Peter finds himself in a museum staring at, much to his dismay, a model of a "Spider-Mobile" that an advertising agency had helped him design in order to better brand his name. It sound silly, but it is understandable why Spidey would want to better market his image. With J. Jonah Jameson previously running The Daily Bugle, one of the most prominent newspapers in New York City, and now with him as Mayor, Spider-Man's popularity ebbs and flows. He wants to take every opportunity that he can in order to convince the public that he is a champion rather than a vigilante menace. One way of achieving this is through appropriate advertising.

Here's the problem: turns out that the Spider-mobile might have been ill-conceived. It seems as though rather than garnering public support, it may have had the adverse effect of eliciting public ridicule. In the museum, Peter is tormented as he watches a group of kids laughing at the automobile rather than praising it and, by extension, supporting Spider-Man himself.

However, Spider-Man shouldn't fret too much. In actuality, it is not likely that advertising and branding would have really altered public perception of the web-crawler. A recent study (not sure if there is an ungated version) by Robert C. Clark of Harvard University examined a panel data set of advertising expenditures for over 300 brands in order to determine the effect on both brand awareness and perceived quality. The overall results suggest that advertising expenditures have a significant effect on awareness but no significant effect on perceived quality.

There does, however, seem to be a noted distinction once measuring the effects for different categories of products. For example, expenditures for the fast food industry had a marginal effect of 0.0144 on brand awareness and a marginal effect of 0.000727 on perceived quality (which is pretty large compared to the rest of the categories).

The author does admit to some limitations. For instance, the relationship between expenditures, brand awareness and perceived quality is only tested for the short-run. A larger panel might reveal some more significant results, particularly for quality (although a six-year panel is pretty long as far as short-run goes).

Similar theories have been argued with regard to politicians and campaign finances. Steve Levitt and Stephen Dubner of Freakonomics, for example, have found no significant relationship between campaign spending and electoral outcomes.

In general, I think this means that Spider-Man should not worry too much about what a particular group of children think about his corny Spidey-Mobile. As he is not selling fast food or consumer electronics, it is unlikely to have a significant effect on the public's perception of him as a hero. In fact, maybe Spider-Man should focus more on heroics and less on advertising, as I doubt it would even serve much to increase his awareness. Jameson is pretty much doing that job for him.

Really, advertising and branding probably works best for new heroes trying to break into the business, such as the Super Young Team. As they are up-and-coming, they need significant brand awareness to compete in the market. Hence, the fact that they engage in these marketing ventures (using twitter, associating themselves with particular products, etc.), could actually have a positive effect for their recognition.

For Spider-Man, however, just get out there and keep beating up Doc Ock. As the saying goes, there is no bad publicity.

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