The Glacier Melted a Little! DC Tries Marketing to Ladies!

Women and DC and Marketing, three things that don’t ever seem to get together. Earlier this year Heidi MacDonald and I debated a bit about whether DC would ever make an effort around female readers. Even earlier than that, almost exactly a full year ago I posted this about DC and marketing to 51% of the population:

Here’s some telling information, when DC was parsing out the exclusives for their new 52, a task that falls under the less expensive budget of PR rather than advertising, did they offer up previews to any female focused media outlets? They obviously had a segmented strategy offering exclusive previews to publicationsMaxim, Ebony and Out magazine but they skipped the female demographic. But did they target the many sites that women clearly frequent? Did they target the many sites that female geeks/comic readers frequent? No, they didn’t. Even with them explicitly stating in their publicity for “Supergirl” they wanted to focus on the female YA audience that is consuming “Hunger Games” they still chose to give that story to USA Today. It baffling to me when Oprah.com one of the broadest female-focused outlets proactively reache s out to my site which is focused on girls and comics (Girls Love Superheroes) to feature content and yet DC didn’t pitch Batgirl, Supergirl, Batwoman or Birds of Prey to a site like Jezebel, Marie Clare or to a site catering to the female geek like the Mary Sue or Geek Mom (which writes about comics all the time and yet their male counterpart Geek Dad was given two previews by DC). My question is simply “why?” Why would something as easy as giving a preview to an outlet which has the potential of providing incremental readership be ignored? 

And now today just 51 weeks later, DC gave an exclusive preview of Worlds’ Finest to The Mary Sue, which is devoted to female geeks. Update: DC gave a preview of Silk Spectre to Geek Mom last week to go along with its interview with Amanda Conner. CRAZINESS!

It’s a Christmas Miracle! Or Christmas Gift! Or just smart marketing.

Whatever it is I am so very pleased to see it. Good job, DC.