With Attendance Over 100,000, Comic-Con’s Not Just for Geeks

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It has become a rite of summer for Hollywood’s sci-fi and fantasy crowd to make an annual pilgrimage down the freeway to San Diego and camp on the exhibit floor of Comic-Con International.


What has become the nation’s largest gathering for fans of comic books and related art forms began in 1970 when several artists organized a one-day comic book convention at a local hotel. Today, Comic-Con International is a non-profit corporation that runs the San Diego event and two similar conventions, WonderCon and Alternative Press Expo, both in San Francisco.


Official attendance figures aren’t in for this year’s event, held July 26-29, but last year the total came to 96,300 fans and estimates for this year are well above 100,000. On the business side, last year’s gathering had 7,700 exhibitors and this year’s number is likely equal to or greater than that figure.


The event hooks up film studios, toy companies and publishers with their core fan base. The idea is to stimulate word-of-mouth by sharing a secrets with a few early adapters and letting them spread the news.


Major L.A.-based companies on the floor included Mattel Inc. and the Walt Disney Co. In years past, such players powered the confab by unveiling mega-budget films or new product lines. But this year, there were no major revelations.


Instead, the event reached its zenith.


The attendance figures bear out what several seminar speakers observed: Sci-fi and comic books have become so much a part of mainstream culture that the gathering is no longer seen as geeks on parade, or some sort of nerd coven. There are no more secret handshakes at the door. And there can hardly be insider secrets, when the broadcast, Internet and print media are out in full force. What transpires at Comic-Con makes headlines in the mainstream press.


This year, the spectacle that is Comic-Com was the most compelling aspect of the weekend, rather than the products it showcased.


While vendors come from all over the world, a large contingent comes from Los Angeles County. This year’s L.A. contingent ran the gamut from one-man art studios to major corporations.


At the small end, entrepreneur Chris Sanders had a booth to market his new creation “Club Coconut.” The main Coconut character resembles a sexy version of the female protagonist from “Lilo & Stitch,” the 2002 film Sanders wrote and directed for Walt Disney Co.


Retailers ranged in size from small specialists like Hollywood Book & Poster Co., a favorite source of old TV and film scripts, to big specialists like Entertainment Earth, the North Hollywood-based clearinghouse for film-related action figures and mock props.


In the middle market, manga publishers dominated with TokyoPop Inc. representing Los Angeles. The growing market for Japanese-style storytelling lured Broccoli International USA, an L.A.-based producer of anime video games, to rent prime acreage in the middle of the floor.



Baby’s PR


The latest baby boom is reverberating through the communications industry. 5W Public Relations an agency with the typical divisions for Corporate, Tech, Consumer Goods, Lifestyle, Investment, and event clientsEvent has added Mom & Baby.


“Having been in the mom market for a while now, it only makes sense to launch a special division,” said Ronn Torossian, chief executive at 5W. “Our results with celebrity outreach and product placement, such as the Belly Maternity/Kingsley T-shirt on Shiloh Jolie Pitt, are an example of how we work and how effective PR can increase sales.”


According to a report last year from Bloomberg News, “the emergence of an older generation of parents with higher incomes and social aspirations is driving demand for premium baby goods.” This so-called echo boom of births has a natural PR tie-in thanks in part to the recent series of babies with celebrity moms such as Angelina Jolie and Britney Spears.


The Mom & Baby division’s clientele shows the upscale trend in baby marketing. Clients include Bella Mama, a luxury line of skin creams and bathing salts to alleviate stretch marks, swelling, dry skin and itchiness during pregnancy and nursing; Belly, an online retailer of fancy maternity wear with tags from Diane Von Furstenberg, Lacoste, Diesel and True Religion; Baby idesign, a line of baby stationery, including birth announcements, thank you cards and holiday cards; Plum Organics Baby Food; and Wadda Juice Baby Juice, a line of low calorie health drink for young children.


5W has offices in Los Angeles and New York.



Say Cheese Burger


Mega-meal purveyor Carl’s Jr. and sister chain Hardee’s have launched a campaign to find the bravest burger eater in the land. The Burger Slayer project encourages customers to snap a photo of themselves eating a hamburger from either restaurant and then submit it online. The best photo for each day will be uploaded to the site, where visitors can view and vote, and the months’ top vote getter will become Burger Slayer of the Month.


The food-and-fantasy campaign comes from Spacedog, the Los Angeles-based interactive agency of record for Carl’s Jr. and Hardee’s. Client CKE Restaurants Inc., parent of both fast-food chains, wanted a campaign that would stimulate traffic online as well as in-restaurant.


“The hottest thing on the Web today is user-generated content,” said Brad Haley, executive vice president of marketing for Carl’s Jr. and Hardee’s. “We wanted to give our customers the chance to create some content of their own in a fast and easy way by shooting still photos of themselves in slayer mode on their camera phones.”


To promote the contest, in-store displays will encourage “burger-slaying.” Online, Spacedog will circulate the message on MySpace.com, photo sharing networks such as Flickr, and on Yahoo with ads.



Staff reporter Joel Russell can be reached at

[email protected]

or at (323) 549-5225, ext. 237.

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