This is prime con season, we just had Star Wars Celebration in May, now we hit the big ones, D23 Expo, San Diego Comic Con and then quickly Dragon Con, Fan Expo and New York Comic Con. The granddaddy of all cons is clearly San Diego Comic Con, while widely believed to be the “be all, end all” of pop culture conventions it still leaves a lot to be desired.
You can find a ton of helpful guides and resources to help you get ready for #SDCC, but you generally have to look around and you for sure have to prepare yourself for the event. That means more than just buying a ticket and showing up with the expectation that you will get into every panel you want and be able to buy every exclusive that you want, because reality will kill you if you go in unprepared.
So how should you do conventions?
Step One - Information overkill - Start by going to the events website (some are much better than others), download the app, follow the event on social media. Then look for groups or sites of fans who often post information about the event, while SDCC has more of these than any other convention. Searching social media for groups, bloggers, or just other fans is never wasted time. San Diego is a great example of having a whole lot of options to help you prepare for the con.
Sites/people to follow for #SDCC
1. Comic Con Official Site - all the official news and info, be careful they tend to publish stuff and rarely update it (exclusives list, schedules) but still should be your first stop.
2. Unofficial San Diego Comic Con site - hands down the most useful site out there for preparing for SDCC, oh and very nice people as well.
3. Parks and Cons Twitter feed - They go almost everywhere and offer good information and insight
4. Crazy4ComicCon Twitter feed - some of the best fan perspective tips on getting ready and having fun at SDCC.
Then add all the studios, artists, brands, etc that you love because they all will be using social media to get info to your before and during conventions.
Being prepared is half the battle, get your tickets, get your hotel room and transportation, get as much information before the event as you can.
Tomorrow I will post part 2 of this, what to do when you arrive at the convention.
Better organization from #SDCC but fans still deserve better
So almost every major exclusive at San Diego Comic Con is now either something you can pre-order or something that you will need to win a lottery or drawing to have a chance at getting. Lego, Funko, Hasbro all of these are top brands that you will need to arrive early (5am or earlier) to have a realistic shot at by heading not to their booth in a mad rush but rather to the Sails Pavillion where you will be shuttled into a long line to wait for your chance to press a button or pull a winning ticket.
I will give credit that SDCC has put out fairly good information for fans so nobody should be surprised, just today in the quick guide they published we found this:
This is as clear of information as you can get, but of course nobody know how many folks Funko, Lego, or others will actually grant booth access to, or how many autograph tickets will be given out. If you look at Funko, most of their numbered exclusive are 2000 or 2500, so figure 4-500 per day, so if you have a 50/50 chance that would mean the first 1,000 people in their line would likely be as many as would get a shot. The longer the odds, the longer the lines will be and the less important camping out will be.
Now while this is better than the pure chaos of a few years ago, the system is still broke. If requiring your fans to spend hours in line each day for a random chance to get into your booth and spend money to buy your products is good marketing, then I am confused. Sure the hype may get you some attention, but the tweets and posts of those who wait hours to leave heartbroken will quickly dampen that hype. To me doing a lottery before the event seems like the most fair way to do things, less stress on booth workers, fans know in advance what they will have access to and can spend time doing other things (panel lines, sleeping, actually enjoying the con).
Each year technology gets better, and each year I wonder why that technology isn’t being used better by those putting on conventions. We have cool ways to verify who people are (unique RFIDs in badges, QR codes on badges, etc) that would allow lines to move faster and for more fair treatment of fans. A classic example would be that each person should only be allowed into an exclusive line once per day (maybe per convention) which would allow more people to get access to great experiences and exclusive products. When you hand out free exclusives if you want to limit how many each person gets, simply scan badges for them and build your database of fans.
Now for this to happen you need to make badges a combination of both easy technology (RFID, QR Codes, bar codes) and add in the personalization of being able to track that technology with the name and info of the user. Perhaps nothing illustrates how not to do this like the SDCC badges for this year. Each has a unique paper badge which indicates your name and what days you have access to the show and what type of badge you have, and then a RFID embedded generic plastic card that goes with it. This makes for an awkward combination that simply looks silly:
Two badges, really? Yeah that is simple and easy for end users.
Cons can be very profitable if done correctly, the rumored bank account of San Diego Comic Con (a non-profit group) is proof of that. The question is will those putting on the cons make their products better experiences for customers who are spending more and more money on attending these events? I expect there will be little change until fans demand it, and I see little evidence fans are willing to demand change.
So I have been to some of the biggest and most popular pop culture conventions in the US, SDCC, SWC, C2E2, ECCC, SLCC and the reality is that fans are being done a huge disservice at most of them. We as fans spend thousands of dollars on tickets, hotels, transportation and merchandise and when we are told after spending that much that in order to take part in biggest events or buy exclusive merchandise that we must wait hours or overnight in line it is simply wrong.
I have watched friends and thousands other camp out in San Diego to try to get into Hall H or lines for merchandise from Hasbro, Lego and others. I recently watched thousands of people spend a night trying to sleep on concrete at Star Wars Celebration. How is it that the most loyal and dedicated fans are forced to endure things like this? Greed and selfishness are the only answers that seem to hold any water. It would be easy to make all panels and exclusive merchandise available via lottery and tied to badges with user pictures, names and either RFID or scanable codes on their badges, so why don’t they?
Long lines make for great PR shots, I mean look how many people waited to see the Star Wars 40th Anniversary panel:
This line wasn’t just to see it live but part of this line was people who were rewarded with sitting in a room watching a live stream of the event. How hard would it have been to simply give them a RFID wristband and let them come back an hour before the event and queue up based on their wristband? How hard would it have been to have held a lottery of all attendees who wanted to get into that panel the month before or weeks before the event and text or email winners 48 hours before with instructions on picking up a wristband the day of or scan their badge as they go to access the event?
If you can come up with a logical reason why people were forced to endure this, please share it. This line included fans who paid thousands to travel to the event, working media members who weren’t part of the “Lucasfilm Elite”(more on that another day.
Now if I am being fair there are people at conventions who get it much better than others, #Funko has gone to a lottery system for access to their booth exclusives at conventions and it has gone very well, #Lego used a pre-event lottery at #SWCO and I hope they do the same thing going forward at #SDCC. Other companies like Del Rey Publishing/Barnes & Noble and even the ReedPop run Celebration store at #SWCO blew it hugely, Del Rey sold all of their inventory of a convention exclusive on the first day and when they found 75 copies to make available on Saturday it caused chaos as thousands ignored instructions and rushed the booth resulting in security being needed to calm things down. ReedPop had lines that were up to 3 hours long to get into their “exclusives” store that was out of stock of many items within the first day and a half of the event.
Now running out of inventory is fine but when you have a list like this in the middle of your second day
You have to wonder why there was no call to get more inventory made and shipped overnight?
I could go on and on with examples of what is either inept leadership of cons or pure content for fans, neither should be acceptable, but I am going to go check my email to see if I get a hotel room for #SDCC this year or not. You know a system that required a lottery last week to find out either this week or next week if you get a room at a slightly less inflated rate because the convention is held in a town that doesn’t have nearly enough hotel rooms to support the event. No really, fans are being treated well by these events, really.
This post was written by freelance photographer and blogger Denzel Eslinger who is covering Star Wars Celebration Orlando for Bleeding Cool. Star Wars Cele
So here is a think I did ahead of my first trip to Star Wars Celebration which starts tomorrow, check it out.
So next week I will be at #StarWarsCelebration my first time at that event and my first time covering a con as media. So what do you want to see? What stories do you want me to share, what pictures?
So while I won’t be attending San Diego Comic Con this year, it doesn’t mean that I won’t be chasing...
So while I won't be attending San Diego Comic Con this year, it doesn't mean that I won't be chasing some exclusives (via shared partners and having friends on the floor), so when Funko starts dropping their exclusives I like many folks feel my wallet getting lighter. Here are the items they announced today as…
So as a Funko collector and a huge Harley Quinn fan it wasn’t going to be hard to impress me...
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Good day sir! I was one of the lucky few to win a signing with you and the Powers crew at ECCC. I super excited to meet you all. Question: on the ticket it says "Each Fan will receive one poster to be signed by the cast. Please do not bring any additional items to sign. No candid photography or video recording is permitted." Are you willing to sign some comics, or is it in poor taste to assume you would? I say earlier you said you'd sign whatever people brought you. Thanks again!
i didn’t make those rules. mike and i will sign whatever you bring.
Happy for the poster, but I expect more than a couple of us might try to sneak in a comic or two. I know you all are on a time schedule and not sure how many of us were lucky enough to win tickets.
Well I didn't buy any Pops this week but the Lego store got me today and my comic book pick for the last 3 weeks was pretty hefty. Oh well life is to be lived, off to #ECCC in a couple days
So I had a couple friends on the Jessica Jones panel last weekend at FanX and they asked me if I would record it and so I did, here are the 4 parts of that panel, which was a lot of fun with some interesting thoughts and opinions about Jessica Jones from both the comic and Netflix worlds
and part 2
and part 3 (where fan questions begin)
and the final shorter part where the fan questions continue
It was a fun panel and just an example of what things are often like at smaller conventions, you can still have a lot of fun and learn about your favorite things in places other than San Diego (Just saying). I am going to check with a couple of the panel groups in Seattle next week to see if they are OK with me taping and posting their panels as well.
