Sunday, November 6, 2011

WOTC Halloween Promotions


WOTC had a couple of nice Halloween instore promotions this year, one that worked pretty well and one that made me go “Huh?”  It would have been nice on both to have more advance notice about either/both of them.
The “Huh” promotion was the Innistrad league.  Lots of nice support (Tracking poster, weekly changes in play and a window cling) but the reward for playing in the league (a poster) did not exactly excite my players or give them an incentive to come back.  Magic players are card players and respond to the offer of another card rather than some other form of epherma.  We supplemented the poster with so remaining guards from the Innistrad Launch Party and a good thing too, as the first people who earned the poster wound up leaving it on the tables after they left.  Kept the card, though and appears enough of an added inducement that most of those who started have shown up for the rest of the league nights.  Some form of alternate art card would likely work better as the reward should WOTC choose to do this again.
The Halloween Friday Night Magic promotion worked a bit better, though again, some advance notice of it would have helped in promoting it.  This was a very nice promotional kit sent to any store that registered a Friday Night Magic event on the Friday before Halloween and consisted of a standee, bags promoting FNM (always welcome) deck boxes (Not as well designed as past deck boxes, thee lacked the catches on the insert tabs to hold the box together, making it hard for them to hold together. About half the people we gave them to left them behind) and bags of Magic logoed M&Ms.  That last was especially cool as I have known few gamers able to resist candy, though several of our players had a quandary.  Do they eat the candy because, well, it’s M&Ms or do they keep it for the cool factor, since it has Magic logos on it?  From what I saw, eating them won out among most of our customers.

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