...Ngl, and I really don't mean any offense by this, but all this railing against 'diversity' is starting to feel like...I mean it's kinda giving off "damn, who hurt you" vibes. ^^;
If this were a topic titled "The Problem with Diversity Marketing" it might be less uncomfortable to read, y'know, knowing that's the focus. And if you'd really like to talk in-depth about that, maybe you should make one. Because as it is, my mental dogwhistle alarms are going off and it's hard to ignore them...

Anyway (to get back on topic), I actually remember hearing about the demise of First Kill on Twitter, and although I wouldn't be interested in something like that anyway, I think another failure its marketing team might have made was not seeking out the kind of audience that would actually appreciate it.

Because I know for a fact that Tumblr users would have gone WILD for a show like that, even if it wasn't that good. People still talk about Supernatural over there, after all...on the other hand, I never saw even one mention of First Kill anywhere on the site. '_' So, either it was really, catastrophically, immensely bad-- which I doubt-- or they just missed their target audience completely.

You don't market 'lesbian vampires' to mainstream people; in my experience they read things like that as 'kink' and move on (or just watch without telling anyone...). You market to younger adults who are more open to urban fantasy, the teens in fandom who are really vocal and shameless about their niche interests, and will make sure everyone who inhabits that niche hears about it and tells their friends.
Niche audiences can be powerful, loyal, and profitable if you have the guts to seek them out (and conversely, stick by them if they happen to find you on their own).

...Although, now that media empires have gotten so big that finding an audience doesn't seem to be a priority anymore, this kind of discussion feels a little like spitting in the wind. ^^; And I think it might explain this:

I think heads don't roll anymore because no one actually cares. ^^; As we learned with the Batwoman movie fiasco, apparently making a movie and not even releasing it can bring in more profit than a potential lukewarm reception.

So I wouldn't be surprised to learn that there's corporate machinery in the works that incentivizes just...producing the content. Regardless of whether anyone watches it, or if anyone even wants to watch it, or if it's even worth watching.
I think we might be in an age where acquiring and retaining valuable IPs (without considering or caring about what made them valuable...) is held above all else, and in such an environment marketing is going to get a lot more confusing...if anyone else out there is reading this, it may be more worth your while to pattern your marketing strategies after smaller producers who are still in touch with reality. ^^;

You're really insistent that selling based on offering diversity doesn't pay, but I'm not entirely sure the evidence is there to back you up on this one. I know you're a published writer out there in the print world, but here on Tapas, you have less than 50 subs in two and a half months of updating, in spite of being a professional-level writer, which is... I'm sorry, but honestly, that's pretty poor performance for somebody of your level, and I'm not sure you're in a place to advise people about marketing, even if your advice on writing craft is very good. Have you considered that a lot of webnovel and webcomic readers are from audiences print under-serves and that they're hungry for content about characters they can relate to? 'Cause I got a massive boost in readership by making it clear that my work contains queer characters, and the audience went wild when it was revealed a major character in my series is autistic.

Also, I have to ask... did you actually watch First Kill? It was one of the highest trending shows on Netflix, so clearly the marketing worked!... it was simply not a good show. It was sloppily storyboarded and edited, with poor sound mixing, a muddled sense of who it was focusing on or what the tone was meant to be. It was so amateurish, that as somebody who works in media, I was shocked it even got onto Netflix (I wouldn't have greenlit it, personally, without significant development work). Pitching it to a general audience without the LGBTQ+ angle would not have saved it. Honestly, I watched it as a lesbian who loved Buffy and Carmilla back in the day specifically because of the lesbian angle, and it didn't save the show for me, because unlike Buffy and Carmilla, it simply wasn't very good. It managed to be one of the top trending shows on Netflix while not even being a well-written or well-made show and having a really underbaked premise and you think it failed because of the marketing? Really?

Did marketing based on "wokeness" ruin Ms Marvel's chances? No, clearly not; that comic was hugely successful, and now it has a TV series that's been a big hit; especially among South Asian audiences who, hey, turns out were really excited to see a muslim desi girl as a superhero and the live action series actually focuses more on the stuff about her heritage and place in the muslim community than the original comic (which was made by a white muslim convert) did. I watched Ms Marvel with my Pakistani partner who was raised Muslim, and they loved it! What about Black Panther? No, that also did great, especially with black audiences!

Marketing a comic based on representing under-represented groups can work really well! It worked great for me! There's an audience out there who are hungry for good representation, and you can 100% make a living off making "It's like this popular thing, but the main characters are gay/black/autistic/insert other under-represented group here", so long as the quality of your work is high and your representation of marginalised people is sensitive, nuanced and feels authentic and relatable. The white cishet neurotypicals have million works in print media already; everyone else comes to webnovels and webcomics because they're where you can get the stuff publishers say "doesn't sell" (but it does).

The advice you're giving might well be good for print media, but honestly, this is the first one of your Quick Guides I'd actively flag as bad advice for success on Tapas. If somebody's looking for novels and comics on Tapas, a lot of the time, they're looking for something that popular published media isn't providing them. That could be formats or genres that aren't popular in their culture, like isekai, but it could also be representation of groups print media overlooks. There's really only so many times I can read and re-read Gideon the Ninth, Fingersmith, Lumberjanes etc. before I want more good stories about Lesbians. I want good stories about queer people, and Tapas is there for me with great titles like Soulmate, Magical Boy and Heartstopper. I mean, seriously, you're talking here about a platform where mlm romance got so popular a bunch of creators of cishet romance complained, and Tapas had to make an entire new genre category on the site and app called "BL" to put the mlm Romance, because it was so much more popular than the heterosexual romance that it was totally dominating the "Romance" genre.

Shoot, I completely forgot that was one of the points I wanted to make! >_<

Anyway, 100% agree: diversity marketing DOES work, actually; only the key is (a) making sure you actually have something of value for the target demographic to see, and (b) using your advertising to highlight it specifically, so they know you're sincere.

With Ms. Marvel in particular, I was actually a little stunned with how much they did with Kamala's heritage. Whether you think the show was well-written or not, you can't deny that it's a far cry from the "My immigrant family is weird and my native culture is weird and I just want to be NORMAL" that I grew up seeing. ^^;

Plus, including topics specific to that demographic's worldview can in itself become a marketing tactic, just by virtue of being unfamiliar to the 'mainstream' viewers. When Twitter was blowing up about the Partition (which I didn't learn about in school either) I bet a lot of people who would not otherwise have heard of Ms. Marvel gave it a look that day.

Gotta say it's a complement and it can aid to the story, but it's not the WHOLE hook of the story.
Some people dig representation, but they want it to be INTERESTING instead of being used as a cheap marketing gimmick.

I agree that dismissing all the plot points and focussing almost exclusively on diversity in the marketing undersells the premise. People will notice the lesbians, but if they only mentions their lesbianism and dismissing other aspects that can make their romance interesting (or the vampire politics), they will be underselling their product.

Guilt tripping folks into liking one's work will not attract readers. And while some may feel the need of calling out users online for their behavior, this can be a double edged weapon, specially if the author is heavily involved in debating controversial topics.

reminds me of high guardian spice's advertising.......The ultimate PR suicide move.

They could have made a bigger emphasis on the cast, the world, the plot, anything, but the studio made it all about themselves.

Diversity is not a bad thing, and can even help, but it can't be one's ONLY selling point.

I like diversity in stories. I don't think I am a woke person but then again what does the term even mean? I feel like people call everything woke nowadays.

i think it comes to those who use diversity as a crutch and dismissing other characterization, marketing and sttorytelling elements.

Diversity is like salt in a dish. It makes the food tastier, but people will not eat a dish that is only salt.

Just like that, diversity can make a story better, but if the story is solid it will not be ALL there is to the story.

When I looked up the definition of woke, it was a post-Civil Rights movement term used among Black people to tell each other to stay aware of social issues. I guess with the mindset that even though the Civil Rights movement is over, that doesn't mean racism is gone.

OK, so why are people calling Baymax woke???

It just feels like a word that had important meaning which people turned into a political buzzword for anything they don't like.

yeah, woke is often used as a buzzword to dismiss content or people as virtue signalers/folks who wanna play savior, just like sometimes diversity is used as one to try to sell stuff.....

completely confused about this too.

Don't know why you are ranting about American politics, I'm not a Republican or a Democrat or anything. Not sure why telling people who like diversity in media or lesbian vampire shows that they are "too woke" has anything to do with that stuff.

If I wrote a story about a trans person to be read by other transpeople and allies, would that make me woke?

Here you are hitting an interesting point......audience.

Different stories have different targets in mind, what appeals to a certain group may alienate others. And while some audiences have common interests with other niches, that's not always the case.

Seeking an audience with whom your story can resonate is often a solid strategy that can lead to a profitable and loyal following when it's done in a genuine manner. (and if the niche is big enough to pay the bills)

Here the key word is being genuine, not like Disney's clumsy half assed attempts of the thousands "first gay X"

I wanted to ask this earlier after reading through this thread, but decided against it thinking it wasn't a fair question. I have to ask, in this general advice thread about marking, why did you specifically bring up using inclusivity and diversity as a way to market. It just seems like an, to be fair, not entirely unrelated by marginally removed, opinion tacked on to "uncontroversial" advice. Why not just talk about how to market media in one thread and then discuss your issues with diversity marketing in a different thread? It just kind of distracts from what the supposed point of the thread was. I wanted to read some advice about marketing, not have to get into the geopolitical aspects of why I've mentioned the race of a character when I talk about on social media, but that's how I felt walking into this thread.

Why would you (someone who is not trans) need to be the one who decides if my story that I wrote as a transperson about a transperson for transpeople is OK by your standards to be classified not by a negative term?

Same goes for media made by black people or anyone outside your identity. It's such a fucked up way to look at media. That is why all this woke labeling makes no sense to me.

Well it's a quick guide, so I didn't expect him to go into too much detail (or any more detail than he already has). I just assumed the discussion would branch out into the nitty gritty details of marketing and not what did happen. But that was my wrong assumption.

And I just want to mention, not that anyone asked, it's not as though I don't think it can or should not be discussed, just that it would be more productive isolated in it's own topic in my opinion.

Okay, so to summarize the opinion of literally everyone here: diversity good, shallow tokenism bad

/thread

Where I live, there has been issues with teachers being harassed and books are being banned from school for being "too woke". Teachers don't want to work in the schools anymore because they don't want to deal with the death threats. I feel like if my work was published in print form, it would probably also be on the banned list for being "too woke". I think in some ways I want to just accept it and say "Yeah I'm woke, go cry about it". I don't think there is anything I could do to appease these people because me just existing is "too political" for some people even if I am not a political person.

I think the discussion of how representation and marketing intersect is an interesting one. It seems like a lot of the frustration around how it's handled stems from how large companies do it. They run the risk of doing it in a way that comes off hollow and superficial, even for the people who benefit from being represented (like the LeFou example mentioned earlier.) In some cases, it's intentionally done to stir up controversy, which I feel like is really disrespectful to marginalized groups who already experience hate just by existing.

But it still works, and that's what matters here.

There's been a really big push to make corporate-produced media more diverse in the past 10 years or so, but no matter how many diverse stories are pumped out in the next few years, it's not going to compare to the decades of stories where certain types of characters were not included for one reason or another. (I don't think any individual stories are to blame here, or that they're even bad for not being diverse, but when there's an overarching pattern where some people are only represented in 'lesser' roles or not at all, that's where I can see people having an issue.)

This mainstream focus on diversity is still seen as fresh, and there's a section of the audience who will be content just knowing that there's a lead character like them for once. Even if they don't like the story, they may continue supporting it because if it's not popular, media makers could decide that "No one wants to read a story with a [insert identity here] character." I'm sure some very savvy marketers know this fear and capitalize on it to generate the most response with minimal effort.

I do agree that only advertising what marginalized identities are in your cast and saying nothing else about your work isn't the most effective way to advertise. In written advertisement, like what's often done on the forums, it matters a little more to give extra details, even if you're responding to a thread that's only asking for "Hey, show me some series with [identity] characters." Marginalized or not, people are going to want to know about the tone, the plot, genre etc.

But heavily advertising them is different.

In visual forms of marketing like commercials, you can get a lot of information without it really having to be said, especially if the thing being advertised is a pre-existing property (ex. In Jurassic Park, you know they're gonna be running from some dinosaurs.)

Most of what I've said so far has been in the context of bigtime corporate media. Two very important differences about Tapas are the creators and the readers. A large portion of both creators and readers here are marginalized in some way. It's less likely that a Tapas creator is going to use diversity as just a quick way to get readers. They're more likely to have diverse stories simply because they want to see more of them. Readers know this and want the same thing, and because of this, adding diversity is less likely to generate conflict here. Tapas creators tend to have a smaller reach anyway, so they're unlikely to start discourse big enough to gain the amount of readers for it to be worth it.

The identities themselves are very important to marginalized people in their daily lives. It affects how they're seen by others, which affects how they get depicted in media, and that creates a feedback loop even if it's not the only factor contributing to why they're discriminated against. So even if the identity itself doesn't influence much, and the story is just advertised as "Hey, this is sci-fi with a black main character," just that alone could be important to draw in a reader who really likes sci-fi, but never got to see someone like them be the protagonist.

In a different world, there would be enough stories for everyone to go around and factors like this would be too vague to hook people, but that's not the world we live in right now.

...I think that's all I had to say. Hopefully, this didn't come off too antagonistic to anyone. I just think it's an interesting topic, and it seemed like everyone was kind of on the same page and just saying it in different ways. So that's it.