I'll second this. I made the same point when they gave us the breakthrough in ATA's known as the Outlaws yesterday. It's nice to be getting something, but it is silly. Either give us real previews, or just eliminate the expectations and don't give us previews at all. Obviously the latter would be an even worse decision from a marketing standpoint.

On point, this figure will be an excellent addition to many warrior teams.

i still feel like i was robbed by the blackest night set... ( everyone still hates that sciencell map here) so i am not gonna get this set. however, i might trade for or buy deadman because he seems like he would work well...

and by the way wizkids, why oh why do you release sets or starters and not give the characters any team abilities? i mean come on, last time you gave us a green lantern without the team ability and now you give us justice league characters without a team abilitys!!! im looking through the blackest night PAC right now and counted 19 (NINETEEN) team abilities that could have been "somehow" incorporated into comic accurate descriptions. but NNNOOOOOOOO...

ps. you better make a darn good cyclops to make up for this...

Are you familiar with the Brightest Day source material? No one's participating on any teams right now. Seems to me that the figs are pretty accurate as a result.

I guess you could say that they're trying to do something more along the lines of "viral" marketing, but what's happened with Brightest Day doesn't feel like that. It's not like with Hammer of Thor where we were getting a bunch of different previews from different sites, that were still official. That was actually pretty cool.

Then they came out with that script which was supposed to allow you to post dials that they had previewed into blogs and other sites, and that was a neat idea. However, they immediately quite posting the dials that way. Not only that, but they don't even bother to post the images when they do finally put the dials in their own galleries. It just seems like they do their best to do the bare minimum to appear to be keeping they're website relevant.

I even made a comment at my tournament on Monday night that it feels like the company is on the verge of shutting down again. I hope I'm wrong, but the lack of consistence. And doing things like saying they're going to make a big announcement that we don't hear about until 2 weeks later from a secondary source just doesn't give me a lot of confidence it what's going on over there.

What is the advertised cost for a Brightest Day starter?

The same argument can be made for those complaining about the lack of team keywords. Personally I'm quite pleased with both the lack of team abilities and the keywords chosen for the characters in this set. I like that they included a Brightest Day keyword. I only which they retroactively granted some sort of keyword the the characters in the Blackest Night set.

I won't dispute your conclusion outside of that I arrive at a different one based upon the same evidence.

re: Viral marketing. Viral marketing does not rely upon "official" anything necessarily. I am a marketer by profession and do a lot of viral and guerilla marketing. That said, I've no issue with things being spoiled via other sources first (whether it seems "official" or not is irrelevant to the actual marketing strategy).

Regardless, the tact has had the desired effect; the consumers are excited for the product.

Fair enough, but the problem with the Brightest Day leak is that it seems like someone just got it early and posted the dials. In my opinion, Viral Marketing is only good if it doesn't cause you to lose faith in the parent company, while getting one excited about the product. Unfortunately, I think that's the component that WizKids is missing the boat on. Viral marketing a product is fine, so long as there is something official going on in tandem, not seemingly as a response.

I totally agree that officially there needs to be a strategy. That said, who's to say there isn't and that we're just unaware of it? (Which is often the case with a viral-style fo marketing)

Look at it this way (and I'm not saying this is what's happened here, just bear with me), WK could easily arrange for the product to fall into folks' hands early, FULL WELL KNOWING the info would end up on the Realms. Voila! Viral Marketing.

Couple that with beginning previews on their own website. Again, more and more I am starting to believe that the Website's usefulness and effectiveness is not necessarily communicating info to us here. WK already communicates directly to the community on the Realms. Given that's the case, I think it's reasonable to look upon the actual WK/HC websites as a resource for folk who do not refer to the Realms as their primary source of info. This can be the casual or new fan, other enterprises, what-have-you.

Lastly, no amount of marketing is going to sway folk that are inclined to come to less-than-optimistic forecasts. Frankly, these types of folk are not the targetted demographic for most marketing campaigns.

If folk are "losing faith" due to their (albeit in most cases, limited) understandings of marketing and business, really there's nothing that WK can do but continue to chug along and put out product. Or in other words, exactly what they're doing right now.

Listen, I'm not going to sit here and work at convincing you that WK isn't going to shut their doors tomorrow (or whenever). I am going to say that I can see no indication, marketing or otherwise, that would cause me concern for either WK, the staff, or their Brands.

Wow!! I terribly misread the first sentence LOL!!!!!

My eyes for some reason so " Like Hawkgirl can actually see me playing with myself" or something like that

I thought he meant that Hawkgirl was his Halloween costume or chosen cos-play theme?

Don't get me wrong, I understand your points (and agree to an extent). I guess I'm drawing the delineation with the difference between how they handled Brightest Day vs how they handled Watchmen. With Watchmen, it was clear that WizKids sent out copies of the sets to different online providers to get reviews and previews on any site they could. That said, the even had their own previews well before that. In that case, it think it worked well. But it worked (for me) because it was obviously intentional.

Anyway, I don't expect my opinion to change how WizKids markets their product, nor do I even expect that mine is the prevailing opinion.

Getting back to where this started, and where I think we at least somewhat agreed. I'd just like to see WizKids return to a more constant and current flow of information. Don't tease announcements that never come. Fix current website features to work fully and properly. And try not to have us get all our information (primarily) from other sources. And for gosh sakes, make use of tools that you built (the remote dial script).

On these points, I think we are in complete agreement (and I would like to think that WK is too! )

Well I'm wondering when they will start previews of DC75th, it comes out in six weeks. Thanksgiving is comming up fast.

I like the dial!