shaneneville.com

how to make your licensors and fans happy in one easy step

Originally uploaded by Shane Neville.

The Avatar promotion at Comic-Con simply blows my mind. It combines multiple companies, perfect timing with the broadcast schedule and a treasure hunt that will make every fan happy.

Here’s the deal: during last weeks episode of Avatar, a major event happened. The Avatar’s flying bison, his best friend and lifelong protector, Aapa, was taken and is now missing.

The one question on every Avatar fan’s minds is: ‘Where is Aapa?’

Imagine my surprise when I show up a Comic-Con and see this poster. How could I resist?

To play the game, you get a map of the Avatar’s world and you need to go to each licensors booth to get a sticker. When you have all five stickers, you go to the Nickelodeon booth to find Aapa.

The tour took me to THQ’s booth where you could play the game on Xbox. Then I went to Paramount, who had nothing Avatar in their booth, which was a bit weird.

The Mattel booth had their Avatar toys on display. The Momo toy that comes with Aang’s figure is to awesome for words.

Upper deck was promoting their Avatar card game at their booth and were giving out Avatar play mats to people who bought cards.

Simon and Shuster, publishers of the upcoming(Jan and Feb 07) Avatar books had a booth at the other end of the hall, and as a result were signifigantly slower than the other participating booths. The books look great and I can’t wait to read them.

At the end of your treasure hunt, you go to the Nickelodeon booth to find Aapa and you are rewarded with an Aapa mouse pad. Not bad swag at all.

Hats off to Nickelodeon’s marketing department for getting a bunch of companies to agree to one promotion (where was Lego?). They did a great job working closely with production that they knew exactly where the story would be at for Comic-Con and could execute a promotion that would actually mean something more than some free swag.

Now to see how much the mouse pads are going to sell for on eBay.