This is the first in an irregular series of posts looking at issues of FANTASTIC FOUR, “The World’s Greatest Comics Magazine”. There are several reasons I picked this title:
– It’s sometimes been very good and sometimes […]

Next week, DC Thomson are launching Beano MAX, not a low-sugar version of the popular kids’ comic but instead a giant size, kind-of-monthly publication with longer stories “designed to give these well-known characters more depth”.
T[…]

From Marketing magazine (the source of 75% of my posts) comes news that Hasbro are doing some aggressive promotion of Monopoly. We can expect, in increasing order of futility: (more…)[…]

Most of Enid Blyton’s books are either fantasies or thrillers, of a sort: a gang of kids, formalised or not, in a run-in with adult crooks. I don’t know if she came up with the formula herself, but commercially speaking she is its definit[…]

Browsing for information on the nineties comics boom I came across a fascinating series of articles by Chuck Rozanski of Mile High Comics, one of America’s most famous comics retailers, offering a behind-the-scenes look at some of the financia[…]

Has “Marketing expert” Jonathan Harwood really got nothing better to do than campaign for the government’s Beefy And Lamby meat promotion site to be reprieved?
Have the BBC really got nothing better to do than report on it?
Have Ian[…]

The world of marketing reacts to the slow post-Christmas season like all the rest of us – by wallowing in lists. Marketing magazine has been making particular play over the last couple of weeks of its “Most Irritating TV Ads of 2006&#8221[…]

I just received – maybe you did too – a spam email from amazon.co.uk entitled “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Pre-Order Your Copy Now!”.
I can understand what Amazon gains from this, but really, why would anybody bother[…]

Hardened chart nerds – and as you might imagine the FT staff includes a few of them – are in a mighty froth over this week’s Top 40 revolution, with download-only tracks (i.e. with no physical presence in, or planned to be in, the s[…]

It’s a quiet week for the marketing press as everyone is still doing the Skiving Britain thing. The “Irritating Ads 2006” survey deserves a separate post and may get it, but mostly what we’re looking at are predictions for 200[…]