Comic Books and Behavioral Advertising: Using Information to Gain New Readers

We already discussed how comic companies should create and advertise tie ins to their films and how Internet users are willing to share information, so it's only natural to have these two concepts come together.

As stated before, customers like to share their opinions and interests online, often liking company pages on Facebook or tweeting to companies on Twitter. We already said that comic companies should take advantage of this information in a previous blog post, but that plan catered more to existing fans. Since the ultimate goal of comics is to increase readership, comic companies should target new readers by using the behavioral data of users on sites such as Facebook and Twitter.

Comic companies should place ads on the pages of users who have liked one of their films or one of the characters of these films. They could place these ads even when users just talk about aspects of the film in their status updates and comments with friends. Ads could also be placed on search result pages when users search for anything having to do with the films, such as movie times.

A much more organic way to get comics into the hands of new readers would be to take advantage of the interest people have in the films and create a website that would appear at the top of the search results, rather than just use ads on the side. People new to the comic universes of the films would have questions about who some characters were, what some items were, or where story lines were going. To answer these questions, these people would obviously turn to searching on the Internet for answers. Comic companies could create a website that contained all the answers to these questions and then linked to a copy of the comic that these answers were found in. It's a much less obvious way to sell books than just ads, and interested visitors would purchase the books to find out more.

Using this data shouldn't be a problem, since Internet users, especially the younger generation, like to give their information out and might actually enjoy seeing ads targeting their interests. Of course, these efforts only get new readers to read one issue of a book. To get them to continue reading, comics have to improve their overall quality of the books they published.