Marvel Comics Target Audience

I recently taped into a friend of mine who works in Marketing for Universal. I found his job to pleasantly interesting. He deals with a lot of the marketing for the website, and digital advertising. He recently showed me an ad Universal placed in a Marvel comic book. He was making note that the ad they placed in Marvel may not be a good source to place an ad. Here is the train of thought behind this concept. The ad was for Harry Potter. He thought why are we promoting Harry Potter in a Marvel Comic book. He stated, he wanted to pull that ad from the comic book and place an ad promoting Marvel Island and the new updated Amazing Spiderman ride in HD 3-D. I was amazed at how marketing in a certain magazine or in this case a comic was important. They needed to focus on their target audience. In this case Marvel comics was a good place to target readers about the Marvel superhero island at Universal Islands of adventure. I thought that was cool.

I did ask him if he thought with a lot of magazines and comic books going digital did he think there would be away to still market the brand. He did say that it is harder to market through digital magazines, however, more and more are doing it. Example, EW and People magazine have digital advertisements. He stated they are working on new ways to do that. It will be an expensive ad if you do it digital and interactive. We then talked about our Mobile device and idevice applications. Most iPhone and android apps for the theme parks are for Halloween Horror Nights and Universal Orlando. He did mention that the company was looking into the iAds apple was offering that when selected on an app it would take them to the website regarding vacation packages and tickets to Universal. Since starting my Digital Marketing class I begun to understand what he does and interesting it is to Market our brand and how we do it in certain and interesting ways. I LIKE IT!

Universal's Halloween Horror Nights Digital Marketing

Every year Universal Orlando begins planning for the Halloween Horror Night event at the beginning of each year. But their most die hard fans wait impatiently for the announcement of each years theme or Icon. Universal does a really good job hyping up the event but they found using social media and their website to track where their fans are searching. Usually by late July the HHN website starts getting hits from fans looking for hints and tips of what is to come. They begin with a tease and a hint on what the theme is going to be. This past year was a speak easy with the icon character being Lady Luck. What they did first is sent out digital advertising to websites showing an eye looking through a peep hole. You clicked on it and it brought you to Universal HHN site with ticket prices and dates. But still no info on what theme was or a map of the park HHN event.

Universal then took to their Facebook by posting a question to it's fans seeing if anyone could guess what the theme would be. This generated more hype. This allowed them to see what people were thinking and how they felt about the event. Most fans posted they bought their tickets or asking each other ticket prices. As always there is a link to the HHN website that brought you to the general information of the event and videos of the past event. Then the company would take to their Twitter account and send out hints and tips of the event. This is still the process of getting the fans to follow of Facebook or Twitter. It looks like the company may utilize PPC on Facebook and or theme park related websites like Theme park insider etc.What these websites do is show you some digital advertising of the event. Once you click on it it takes you to the website with dates, ticket pricing and vacation packages.Universal has used these Social media and advertising and the PPC as part of their KPI. They found what works best for them when generating attention to their site. It is all about the planning before the big reveal. Once the Icon and theme is revealed then the Marketing begins to take of further. I am excited to see and where the advertisements will pop this year. I plan to keep a close eye on their twitter, Facebook, and their website closely. With apples iPhone, iPod touch and iPad, Universal is using digital iAds to help generate attention to their website and creating a App for the event as well. More to come on the Mobile and idevice advertising.