Saturday, November 10, 2012

Self-Awareness Saturday--DC Execs Again Master The PR Game

In an interview on Newsarama, DC Vice-President Of Marketing John Cunningham had this to say when asked whether it having so many Batman titles might dilute sales:

Well, I don't think it's quite rational to assume that the sales level of a current book would maintain if you created a second title in a different series of book. It would be great in the abstract if you could say, "Well, we can maintain a book here at this level while launching another one." But I don't think that's realistic in any way.

 Oh, wait, sorry, my mistake...that was an answer to why they didn't keep the Hellblazer title going while launching the nu52 Constantine title.

Because 14 Bat titles a month? No problem. But the idea of 2 Constantine books? "Irrational" and "not realistic."

I should point out that Cunningham and DC Senior VP Of Sales Bob Wayne do a masterful job of dismissing every question asked by Newsarama's Vaneta Rogers as the product of a deranged mind who knows nothing about comic books. Amongst their responses (For what it's worth, none of the questions was anything other than what many of us have been asking based on recent DC actions):

Cunningham: No, I think that sort of analysis is extremely surface and doesn't deal with the facts at all.
Nrama: What facts? What facts am I missing?
Cunningham: I don't know. I didn't hear enough of your thesis to know how that works.

or

Cunningham: That's a bizarrely speculative question. I don't really understand it.

or

Cunningham: I don't know. What a heck of a question. I guess I'm going to respond to that by saying that framework is weird.

or

 Wayne: I find this whole question kind of odd. 

or

Cunningham: You use that phrase "seems to indicate," and that seems to me to be the problem here...So some of these questions sort of veer into this weird speculation that I don't understand where the basis in reality even comes from.

Yes, that's all from the same interview. No, those are not all of the examples.

Obviously, DC sends these two out on PR runs because they've mastered the sophisticated task of "pretend not to understand every question and then turn them back on the interviewer and imply that she's stupid for having asked it." Well played, sirs, well played.

8 comments:

Siskoid said...

So nobody at DC read my thesis on their communications clusterfarce.

Or they did, but they thought it was weird, irrational and out of left field.

Ostrich, meet hole in the ground.

ShadowWing Tronix said...

Sounds like they have a career in politics if the comic thing doesn't work out.

SallyP said...

Is it just me, or do they really seem like a pair of dicks?

Siskoid said...

Two dicks, but no balls.

Siskoid said...

Thanks for coming. I'll be here all week.

snell said...

The thing is, these are questions they should have been prepped for. There's nothing outrageous or off the wall there. After killing Vertigo's longest running title, how can you NOT be ready for questions on the future of the imprint and its characters?

Siskoid said...

Exactly! There's absolutely no one trained in P.R. sitting in on these meetings.

Anonymous said...

Could students in school answer questions that way? "Billy, why did President Lincoln wait until after the battle of Antietam before he signed the Emancipation Proclamation?" "That's a bizarrely speculative question. I'm going to respond by saying the framework is weird."