Ever since Hollywood discovered that you can apparently fix anything onscreen with a computer, they have.
And now, according to the commercials, our phones will shoot and edit movies of Hollywood quality.
So, surely a crowd of folks cheering the Outdoor Galore Store is a fine start to an advertisement for Enis’s Good Sporting’s OutdoorsFest, right?
Sure it is.
So, twice now, I’ve committed to a big bike purchase. Both times, I had to look hard at SURLY bikes really carefully… you know, ’cause they had what I…NEED.
And I ran across this article on their site a while back and archived it, wanting to share. And now, I share. It’s funny. Maybe I think it’s funny just because it takes bad advertising choices to task. Maybe I like it because the comments that the image received prove that there are people- like me and, I think, you- who know better than to believe ANYTHING and advertisement tells us. I’m neck deep in advertising and I see bad choices now and again. Mostly on the down-and-dirty TV ads that tend to run first thing in the morning or late in the evening. Feel free to comment below on your favorite rotten ad.
And if you’re in the market for a high-end bike. Look at Surly.
I forgot to mention it. I did the same last year, too. But Hubriscomics.com is TWO years old! Happy birthday to it. It’s been a lot of fun getting this far- selling a few books, adding Hubris to gocomics, adding a little advertising, advertising Hubris himself on other sites, and sending Hubris off into the most daring story arc I’ve ever conceived. I’ve got more plans in the works, too. Maybe some comics conventions, possibly some sales in some odd markets here and there. I’d like to animate the Header art. Superfan Allan says I should do a Youtube channel. That sounds exciting. Might see if there’s a market to sell the original art or pencil layouts of the cartoons themselves. Any of those things sound like fun to you guys? If I go the Comics convention route, I think I should have ‘Team Hubris’ patches made up. Folks that have them would get discounts or free stuff… plus they’d be wearing a cool ‘Team Hubris’ patch.
Gotta get back to work. Hubris, Paste, Lowell, Kara and the rest aren’t going to get themselves in trouble without me.
Cartooning- specifically comic strips- has taken an odd turn over the past couple of decades. The decline of the newspapers as the #1 source of information for most Americans has a lot to do with it. Way back (not THAT far back) when every major city in America had at least two newspapers, the value of any single comic strip or writer’s column could be measured in dollars gained or lost when a newspaper quit publishing it or started publishing it. If one paper quit publishing Doonesbury, for instance, and it’s sales and subscriptions declined while the other local paper picked up Doonesbury and its sales increased, then you could say that Doonesbury had a particular instantly provable value to a newspaper.
These days, not so much.
A writer I work with is also an auditor of newspaper circulation. Circulation (sales of newspapers, eyes available to advertisers in that newspaper) is how the newspapers set their advertising rates. Subscriptions and sales don’t generate a newspaper’s main income stream- it sets the scale for the newspaper to generate it’s main income stream… advertising. The newspapers are really good at inflating their circulation numbers in lots of ways, so they can charge more for the ads they run and therefore stay in business.
But I mentioned the decline of the papers, right? There’s that whole supply-and-demand thing. If advertisers are now running off to other venues, then the newspapers have to either drop their ad rates no matter what their circulation numbers are, or create a new value to advertising within their pages.
I hear from a lot of people (editorial cartoonists, newspaper illustrators, random newspaper employees, and circulation auditors) that the average newspaper’s decision makers are unwilling to make their jobs any more complicated by doing things that might attract readers. In other words, they’ve already given up. Sometimes, it’s even a matter of not backing up to a pre-automated method of doing things that’s the hang-up. Specifically, the idea that newspapers might draw in just the sort of interested reader they want to/need to by using webcomics on their comics page- hip, attention-grabbing, high-traffic comics used cheaply because it’s just another revenue stream to THOSE cartoonists- not the be-all, end-all of their income like for syndicated cartoons. The editor of the comics page of the paper I’m talking about said that it wouldn’t work because they now use a computer program that automatically drops in the daily comic strips and no one has to do any work. If the newspaper used webcomics, then the page would have to be worked on by someone every day, and then they couldn’t continue to leave at 2:00.
Of course, the other side of this is that it used to be that the only way to make a comic strip earn you a living was to be syndicated. You could draw a comic strip for your local paper, but one paper doesn’t make a wage out of one comic strip. The new thing is webcomics, where you have to be your own syndicate and sell anything and everything you can- T-shirts, hats, books, comics, sketches, originals, and of course, advertising- in order to make a fraction of what the syndicates used to be able to do for you. Stinky, for most would-be cartoonists, but it is an option. It’s a whole new business to be in.
There you have it. If you’re an old-guard syndicated cartoonist, it’s the beginning of the end. If you’re a young cartoonist who has time and energy to float a webcomic and work it like a business, it’s the beginning of the beginning.
And that brings me, in a hugely roundabout fashion, to my point:
Hubris has another ad on the site. There are some Google ads which pay a tiny bit every so often, and a Foxy Bingo ad which will stay up for at least a year per agreement, and now I have a Project Wonderful ad. It’s over there on the right hand side just below the Hubris Book Ad. Right now, the bidding is young and tiny, but if you see anything keen on there you’d like to read, by all means, click that thang and check it out. The more click-throughs there are from Hubris, the better reputation I get for being a good adspace to run in, and the revenue goes up by tiny bits.
And there you go. The business of Hubris.
Also, I’m about to add stuff onto the Outdoor Galore Store Zazzle page, just in time for your Christmas shoppin’.
Ugh. I’m a money-grubbin’ hack now. Gotta go skate.
Advertising agencies need illustrations now and again. I like the work. A couple of years ago, a very fine agency asked me to work with them on the area 9-1-1 account. It was all about educating the populace about using cell phones to contact 9-1-1. Contrary to what all conspiracy people and most average folk will tell you, 9-1-1 cannot locate your cell signal through some rapidly-becoming-commonplace technique of triangulating. I will not speculate if there are any agencies outside of an action movie that can click computer buttons and find your cell phone, but in the real world? 9-1-1 is pretty helpless to find you because of the way cell towers shuffle signals around just to keep the whole mess working on a day-to-day basis.
Wow. That got off onto a tangent. Back to the point: I have fun doing the initial sketches for advertising projects. They didn’t have any idea what sort of characters they wanted, only that they wanted to do a comic book and it would have to have characters in it. Fun. I drew a few dozen for them to start from. Here are a few:
Lots of fun, being given a parameter like “It’s about cell phone callers and 9-1-1. Other than that, we have no idea” Your imagination can go off in any and all directions, because you never know what’s going to strike the client as appropriate or fun or just happens to dovetail with some other idea they forgot to mention to you in the meeting.
I left out the sketches that led up to the actual characters. Honestly, I left out a LOT of sketches that didn’t lead to anything. Yet. That’s the other fun part. There’s a pirate character I’d love to trot out for something else another day. I wouldn’t mind using a couple of the sketches here to do something fun one day.
But there’s no time for that now- Now is when you get the characters as they were (are) used:
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