On Con, Con Meta, and Meta Cons

Kelts wrote about the “festivities” around AnimeJapan, along with the industry events that happened around the same time. Just excerpting because why not:

And in the two days following AnimeJapan, the second annual Project Anime Tokyo was held in the flashy UDX building in Akihabara. The conference is designed to bring together overseas anime convention organizers with Japanese studios for communication and collaboration. The brainchild of Marc Perez, CEO of the Society for the Promotion of Japanese Animation, and Nobuyuki Takahashi, president of Studio Hard Deluxe, the first meeting was held by the SPJA in Los Angeles in 2012 at Anime Expo (AX), the largest anime convention in North America.

“One of the things we want to prove to the industry is that we (anime conventions) can promote them with very little investment,” says Perez. The conference is now a twice-yearly event held in LA and Tokyo alongside AX and AnimeJapan. “We also want convention organizers from around the world to share ideas and best practices. One of our goals is to eventually establish a joint charter, rules and regulations about things like bootlegging and piracy and so on.”

You know Project Anime? The con about cons? People sat in panels about cons and industry and press and what not. I think this might be what a commenter was referring to about SPJA. And the end is still just a matter of signaling and getting people to leverage available resources. Conventions may be an underutilized resource, if indeed they are still growing (and most signs point to yes, at least in America), so then there’s going to be some way where somebody can leverage these resources with Japanese businesses in a manner in which someone (likely in Japan), with all the access and resources available, come up and execute a more unified strategy to bring it to market, to market, to promote, to build and deliver.

Why do I keep saying this LOL.

But I’m not sure if this is something we can (even naively) say is good or not, because now we’re getting to the place where you have to roll up your sleeves and make your spreadsheets and decks sparkle like an idol on stage. And there will be winners and losers in the end of all of this, just a matter of how much, and how many.

Give the full article a read, I think it plays consistent with the overall theme about where fan money is going to overseas, what Japan is (or isn’t) doing about it.

I wonder if the  Anime Anime guy would get something out of Project Anime.

PS. Studio Hard Deluxe? That sounds like an upgrade to Vertical, Inc.

PPS. Just how effective are cons at actually promoting sales of things? How about brand recognition and awareness? How about building up a fan base? It’s hard to say…