With VIZ Media aggressively releasing three volumes per month of the bestselling Naruto manga series this fall (see 'Naruto Manga Goes Nuclear'), we sat down with Gonzalo Ferreyra, Viz Vice President of Sales, and David Rewalt, Director of Retail Marketing, to talk about the details and implications of this. In Part 2, below, of this two part interview, we talk about the impact of the Naruto push on the manga and anime markets. In Part 1 (see 'Interview with Viz's Gonzalo Ferreyra, Part 1'), we talked about the rationale for the move and how it will be implemented.
What impact do you expect this event to have on sales per volume of the affected Naruto releases?
GF: That's the million dollar question right there.
Probably a lot more than a million.
GF: (Laughs) Obviously, our hope is that we maintain the numbers in the long term. We certainly anticipate that in the near term the numbers may be slightly softer, but that Naruto will have legs, and we have a lot of newcomers to the series as evidenced by... number one is still up there. We fully expect them on a volume by volume basis to be a bit softer than the individual releases, but we think those same fans will play a game of catch up with the series. We'll see those be in the top 10 for quite a long time, as we see all these fans, at their own pace, catch up the 12 volumes.
Another million dollar question, what impact do you expect this event to have on non-Naruto manga releases? You are sucking a lot of dollars out of the market.
GF: It's a good question, I can't say we've pondered it too deeply.
DR: The hope is that it will increase those. You're driving more people into the retail stores and online to look at manga. So I would think that if you set your adjacencies up right, and you do all the right marketing elements, you hope it positively affects sales. That's the hope anyway.
Where's the money coming from? That's $100 over four months.
GF: You mean where is the money coming from out of the consumer's pocket?
Even at the retail level--how do they stock? If they're going to bring in 12 Naruto volumes over 4 months, that's a big part of their open to buy.
GF: Everybody has been quite ready to accommodate it in their budgets, without necessarily stealing the full portion of that from the rest of their purchasing power. Without a sharper crystal ball in front of me, it's a tough one to answer. I think as an industry we're going to learn a great deal about what this kind of event does for us. There's the potential of a downside, we obviously see tremendous potential for an upside in terms of the overall category getting a lift and drawing consumers. I think the consumer ultimately is going to make the decision and will make very clear to us whether it was a wise move or not.
Some people have characterized this as a market share grab. In other words, Viz is putting out a huge number of volumes of its most popular book; it's going to suck dollars out of the environment; suck the oxygen out of the room for competitors. What do you say to that characterization?
GF: I can certainly see how it might look that way. I'd probably suspect the same thing if I were somewhere else, but I can say in all honesty that was never even remotely a consideration of ours. It really was about the property, about the needs of this narrative arc, about the need to be true to the spirit of the property and to the manga in light of everything else we've seen hitting these shores. I wish I had something more scandalous to report, but I really don't.
It wasn't lost on us that it would have a major impact on the buying patterns of both the retailers and the consumers. Again, in every conversation we had, not surprisingly we chose to see that as a positive move for what is still a rapidly growing category rather than any damage that it may potentially do to us. It's drawing a tremendous amount of attention to the category in the stores, and I think we all have something to gain from that, as David was pointing out.
If it's good for Naruto, does that mean it's also good for other properties to be closer in release time to the Japanese release, or is it a particular factor because of the two storylines for Naruto?
GF: To answer the question 'if it's good for Naruto, is it good for the rest of the properties,' we strongly believe that's the case, and largely because clearly Naruto is one of the market leaders in terms of properties in this category. It creates new customers every day--new fans not just of Naruto itself, but new fans of manga. We firmly believe that there are fans that are coming into manga by way of Naruto and they're staying with it, they're moving beyond Naruto, they're buying other properties, they're becoming lifelong devotees of the category at large. Absolutely we believe it's a tremendous boon.
To clarify, would it be good for other properties to be released here closer to their Japanese release time as a strategy? Is it just because there are two storylines in Naruto and you don't want two sets of images floating around at the same time, or is it all driven by the fact that you want the anime to be released here the day after it's released in Japan so you don't lose as many sales to illegal downloads?
GF: That was the primary motivation for it, the latter--regaining supremacy for the manga over the anime storyline and characterization here in the US. But to answer your question, I think it's a model we all wish we could emulate more often--to narrow that gap as much as possible. The only downside I can foresee there is you have less history to work from in the Japanese market, but I would give that up for the sake of narrowing the appearance on US shores versus the original appearance in Japan.
What impact do you think releasing the anime here closer to the anime release in Japan will have on DVD sales? Do you think there will be a material difference, because there'd been less time for people to acquire the material illegally?
GF: I certainly hope so. I would suspect that that would be the case. There's no question that there are many fans right now who capture it in downloadable form prior to the legitimate US release. You narrow the window of time that they can do that in, and we're going to have more consumers for the DVD release.
So you think they'd buy instead of steal?
GF: I think some of them would. We're not so na?ve as to think that every customer who is happy downloading a pirated version would readily purchase it, but we do believe that there's a portion of that audience who would be more than happy to buy the legitimate DVD release if it were available. If it's not available, they go to the other option. If we make it available, they'll be a customer.
