ComicMix Quick Picks – April 15, 2009
Boy, it’s been taxing today. Here’s a list of quick comic-related items that have piled up here…
- Here’s a phrase to strike terror into the hearts of mortals: Wired UK Columnist Warren Ellis. His opening salvo is pretty good too: ‘We’re living in the last days of the Roman empire’
- USPS – The Simpsons postage stamps. The Simpsons is the only television show to be featured as the sole subject of a stamp set while still in prime-time production.
- Marvel has No-Prizes. DC Comics has errata sheets.
- BeaucoupKevin(dot)com | How To Spam Comments The Marvel Way
- The Road to Area 51. Starring Leslie Hope and Denise Crosby, I suppose.
- Hey, Eliza Dushku has a tattoo! Yeah, probably NSFW.
Any more? COnsider this an open thread.
I'm not real convinced by the Area 51 story – the claim that a disc-shaped aircraft did Mach 3 is one i find hard to accept; i don't believe that something that shape could be stable at that speed.Besides, at the time that this was supposedly going on, the SR71 was already in development, and it did everything the article claims this super-secret aircraft did. Probably better.
There is a US Law that prevents living people from appearing on Postage Stamps. It keeps Politicians from pressuring the Post Office into immortalizing them, I guess. Should that extend to current TV Shows? Hmm.What if the Post Office let companies advertise with stamps? Say General Mills wanted to put out an issue of 43 cent stamps with cereal boxes on them. The company pays the post office for printing the stamps. (So the Post Office doesn't lose any money if the stamps don't sell.) Then the company subsidizes the stamps to the tune of a penny. You can mail a Letter of Postcard for ONE CENT cheaper if you use a Lucky Charms stamp. Heck, let companies BID for the rights to advertise on postage! See if there is a marketplace for this idea.You can already generate personalized postage. But that only puts your postage on what you mail. This would be another form of viral marketing. This is too good an idea for it to have originated with me. Hmm. I've got a sheet of stamps with Disney Characters on it. Did Disney pay the post office for that honor? Did Fox pay the Post Office to put the Simpsons on stamps?
I was expecting a Post Raisin Bran/Post Office joke and instead you presented a thoughtful business idea. Nice.
Even at a penny, that's a massive outlay for a company's ad budget. For a philatelic stamp, 25 to 30 million stamps are produced. The standard run is 80 to 100 million, and some of the more popular stamps will go up as high as 200 million. Christmas stamps and love stamps can be printed in quantities up to 1.2 billion per year.At a penny a stamp, that's a hefty ad buy– even more when you consider that you'll have to get ads underwriting all the stamps, or there will be a run on the first class stamps that are a penny cheaper, because we'd do that sort of thing. OTOH, that would make for a fast run on the stamps, injecting a fiscal shot in the arm that wouldn't be used up anytime soon… hmm.
There's nothing to stop Companies and the USPS from making their Advertising Stamps LIMITED EDITIONS of 20 million, 50 million or even only 1 million stamps, if the USPS wants to do "small" print runs. This would lower the cost of Advertising and not put Companies on the hook for 100 million dollars plus if the USPS decided that they wanted to sell a billion or more "Coke" stamps. The USPS might find that some Advertising Stamps would sell beyond their initial subsidized limited editions. In that case, I think the USPS ought to be allowed to sell those stamps (at full face value) for some period of time without the company paying for the printing or subsidy and without the USPS paying the company for the use of it's advertising designs or logos. This gives companies an incentive for creating designs that will sell beyond their limited edition print run.Even at 100 million stamps, the one cent subsidy only comes to 1 million dollars. I don't know what the actual cost of printing the stamps is, but let's say a company pays the Post Office another 1-4 cents per stamp for the printing and the right to advertise on US Postage. (Again, let companies bid to see how much they would pay to put their images on 100 million stamps. Let the marketplace set the price.) Now for only 2 to 5 million dollars a company gets to make 100 million stamps. Which are seen by how many people? How many "advertising impressions" are made from those 100 million stamps? Are they Collected? Treasured? Displayed for how long? Did somebody say, "treasured and displayed forever"? Plus, the initial runs would receive a lot of tangential advertising from News Stories, TV talk shows and Stamp Collectors reselling the stamp.Plus, for every stamp that is collected, put in an album or on display and NOT used, that's just PURE profit for the USPS! It seems like a WIN/WIN/WIN situation for Advertisers, Consumers and the USPS. Now, you would have to set up some kind of semi-independent Approval Board, that would approve potential Advertising Designs to make sure they met some minimum standards of taste and decency. You'll probably have to keep the advertising of cigarettes, drugs, alcohol, and adult products off of stamps. I can't see the USPS going for Viagra, Girls Gone Wild or Schlitz Malt Liquor stamps. And I think the Advertising Stamps still shouldn't feature the images of living people. But those are details that can be worked out without too much added cost.
No George Reeves stamp yet? Dean Martin? What's up with that?