The average comic book has thirty four pages, the majority of which contain the words and art related to the story that individual comic. But comic books are more then just art and story. Inside each comic is also a marketing and branding effort aimed at converting targeted readers to customers. Let’s start with looking at the marketing and advertising efforts within comic books. The 13^th issue of the comic book Batman and Robin, published by DC Comics, will be the example for this post.

Open up the front cover and the very first thing you see is an advertisement for a new flavor of gum. You can’t miss it as it’s right on the inside of the cover. The ad is simple and quirky, aimed at the average DC comic reader and their search for the type of gum that they want to chew.

The next advertisement, found halfway through the book, is for the roll out of a new Nintendo Wii game. The beauty of this ad is that is a two page spread that comes right in the middle of the story where readers can’t avoid it as they turn through the pages. The colors themselves are drab, but the majority of the ad is taken up with drawn characters. The beauty of the hand drawn characters is that they could be taken as the continuation of the comic book story so it can confuse the reader for a few seconds before they recognize it as marketing for the Wii game.

On the inside of the back cover is an ad for breath freshening toothpaste. Combine this ad with the one inside the front cover and it seems obvious that the publishers are targeting people with bad breath problems. Apparently, marketers believe that comic book readers have hygiene problems; happily I do not fall into that category.

The outside of the back cover has an advertisement for another new video game that involves Batman, a DC Comics superstar character. So of the four placed ads within the comic half made you more socially acceptable while the other half feed the needs of the video gamer.

Much like with television advertising, companies who advertise in comic books want to target their ads at specific markets and demographics to try and convert non-customers to buyers of their products or services. The comic book is one avenue for advertising dollars that targets mostly young men and from this single sample, I believe that the ads are targeted correctly. Is everyone who reads a comic within that marketers targeted demographic? Obviously the answer is no. However, there must be enough market exposure to the desired demographic to warrant spending these companies’ marketing and advertising dollars within the pages of comic books.

Branding is also a big part of each comic book. Next week we’ll look at the various branding efforts going on within the pages of each comic book issue.