When Harry Met Selling

By Michelle Chihara, AlterNet. Posted November 8, 2001.

In Harry Potter's world, the Express train to Hogwarts wizardry school leaves from platform 9 3/4 -- a platform that exists invisibly between platforms 9 and 10 at Kings Cross Station. To find it, you have to rush headlong at a wrought iron barrier and trust that you'll pop out onto 9 and 3/4. In other words, you have to close your eyes for a moment, ignore our messy Muggle world, and believe in Harry's.

"Muggle" means normal, or without wizard blood, without magic. This week, Harry Potter's magical world meets Muggle reality. On November 16, the wave of Pottermania crests with the release of "Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone" and the Lego sets hit K-marts everywhere. To the corporate colossus behind the film, Friday is the true dawning of the age of Harry Potter.

We all knew this was coming, those of us who have grown to love Harry Potter through the printed word alone. I read the first two Harry Potter novels back-to-back on a 14-hour plane ride, in those innocent days when author J.K. Rowling had captured millions of imaginations, but no corporate sponsorships. The books gave me a taste of that childhood sense of possibility and wonder, something I needed a reminder of at the time. But as we steel ourselves for the movie and merchandising mania, will any of us still remember how to get to Platform 9 3/4 by ourselves, without the brand-name gimmicks?

Ironically, Harry Potter fans have been promised a movie faithful to the books, tasteful merchandise, and a kinder, gentler, multi-million dollar marketing campaign. The conglomerate behind the little magician with the lightning-shaped scar is trying to tread lightly. AOL Time Warner knows how much fans love J.K. Rowling's creation. They know that Harry is the goose that lays the golden egg -- to the tune, they're hoping, of $2 billion projected revenue, in everything from box office returns to product tie-ins. So they have held back, riding the tide of Harry-love, in a "less is more," $30-40 million marketing campaign. The idea is not to drown Harry Potter fans with too much gaudy hype.

So what does a $40 million, "less is more" campaign look like, in the real world? The number of licensees on Harry Potter merchandise is comparatively small -- a mere 85 licensees, versus 150 for Batman, often cited as a comparable "event movie." Press about the movie has been under tight control -- very few interviews with actors, a tightly controlled set of images released from the movie. Coca-Cola is the only official sponsor.

Rowling and Coca-Cola are both taking every opportunity to tout Coca-Cola's $18 million literacy campaign for kindergarten through third-graders. It's a nice thought, isn't it? The marketing for a movie, which will inevitably replace a book in the imagination of millions, sponsors a literacy campaign? Kind of like tobacco taxes sponsoring rehab programs.

	All publicity campaigns aimed at kids have an added pressure, paradoxically, to appear as if they're not interested in profiting off their customers -- as if they were spending all the millions purely out of a love of youth and Harry.

All publicity campaigns aimed at kids have an added pressure, paradoxically, to appear as if they're not interested in profiting off their customers -- as if they were spending all the millions purely out of a love of youth and Harry. "Authenticity, that's what they all want," says Tom Frank, editor of independent magazine The Baffler and long-time critic of corporate and advertising excess. "The idea is to make it seem like some sort of authentic experience, not a sold-out commercial thing. There can't be any perception of commercialization or sell-out."

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