Join Forces with Super Heroes — You Already Know Them
The first page of Iron Man Issue #286 features an ad compelling readers to “join forces with Marvel’s Super Heroes.” It depicts four popular heroes engaged in a fight, and tells viewers of the ad that they too can battle super-villains by playing the Marvel Super Heroes game.
The most striking feature of this ad is the image of Spider-Man, the Hulk, Wolverine, and Captain America, fighting against Venom. At face value, the superheroes are all in active poses, in the midst of defeating the villain. They each have their own personalizations in their respective comics, which are likely assumed to be known to the viewer. Aside from their individual stories however, each of the characters also represent strength and power, and in their victory over Venom they represent the victory the ad’s audience could achieve by playing the game.
The ad says as much in the final sentence of its description of the game, with its promise to the reader that “the biggest Super Hero of all might be you!” In telling the viewer that they could be a superhero, this ad makes an appeal beyond the game it’s selling and asserts that players can retain the qualities of their favorite superheroes. The things that make the heroes in the ad so memorable, their strength, power, and victoriousness, can go beyond the characters and game, to imbue the player with those qualities.
By drawing on the audiences preconceived ideas about the superheroes depicted and what they represent to the individual viewer, and offering them the chance to join their ranks, this ad lets the viewer themself make the judgements about the game, based off of their preconceptions rather than the game’s actual content. In fact, very little about the game itself is mentioned. Through this ad we learn that the premise of the game is to guide a team of heroes to battle and to search out supervillains, but nothing about how.
The most we learn about the game itself from this ad is that it “includes 60 full color collectible Super Hero and Super-Villian Cards!” This blurb departs from the themes of the rest of the ad of power and heroism, but actually falls more in line with many of the other ads featured in this issue. Of the advertisements in Iron Man #286, about half are for collectible cards, featuring either Marvel characters or athletes. These ads focus on the exclusivity and value of the cards they advertise, and by including wording like “full color” and “collectible,” the product being marketed here becomes more than just a game, it gains the more prestigious connotations of value that are carried by collectible cards, beyond that of a simple game.
Overall, focusing on the popular characters involved in the game rather than the game-play itself allows the ad’s viewer to make their own assumptions about the nature of the game and what it will mean to join the team of heroes via playing it. The ad provides simple information, a few characters in active poses, but the viewers ideas about what those characters represent are what allow for the most effective parts of the marketing. Without ideas about who the heroes are, the offer of joining them has little allure. But with an audience who is invested in the heroes and their stories, and form that have developed their own relationships with the characters and conceptions of their power, the ad doesn’t ever need to explicitly say that playing the game will give you traits that you want. Instead it tells you there’s an opportunity to fight alongside some characters, and lets your own relationship with the characters and their meanings do the rest.
