Yu-Gi-Oh is sleeper hit for merchandisers
The making of a new merchandising hit is detailed in this Wall Street Journal story (subscription required).
The Yu-Gi-Oh line, including home videos and music CDs, is expected to ring up $500 million in retail sales this year, making it one of the hottest tickets for Christmas, analysts say. "I've had to increase my Yu-Gi-Oh estimates several times this year," says John Taylor of Arcadia Investment Inc. "It's turning out to be much bigger than I had originally thought."
...Yu-Gi-Oh, the brainchild of Kazuki Takahashi, a Japanese comic-book illustrator, is the tale of a high-school wimp named Yu-Gi who morphs into a spike-haired hero, with a following of monsters and dragons that battle others of their ilk. Like the Pokemon menagerie, the Yu-Gi-Oh critters' strengths are charted on the back of trading cards that kids collect or use in games.
Since the Yu-Gi-Oh character line is similar to Pokemon, the Journal reports that retailers were initially very sceptical about its potential success, and there were questions whether direct marketing could get thru young boys who prefer to discover cool trends on their own. By deliberately limiting the number of licensees that'll brand products with Yu-Gi-Oh's characters and keeping production below demand there's significant pent-up interest and no oversaturation.
Yu-Gi-Oh's demographic, eight- to 14-year-olds, presented a major problem for some retailers, who said skateboards and sports are more important to these boys than are toys. Plus, "they just don't like to be marketed to," Ms. Nowicki says.
So to avoid the appearance of advertising, Yu-Gi-Oh promoters -- including Konami Corp., which makes Yu-Gi-Oh videogames, and Upper Deck, which makes the trading cards -- flooded the Internet earlier this year with press releases about Yu-Gi-Oh's pending U.S. launch. Hungry for content, many youth-oriented Web sites ran them. "It helped that many of the press releases were rewritten as news stories by Web masters," says Brian Hershey, who pitched the story idea for SSA Public Relations Inc. "The idea behind the Internet push was to let kids think that they were discovering Yu-Gi-Oh themselves while surfing the net."