Mattel posted a few notes over the weekend. Two are very obviously attempts at PR damage control.

First, there’s this about the MOTU art book:

A note to our fans from David Voss VP of Mattel Design Boys Entertainment brands

Subject: Designed @Mattel Vol. 1

In an effort to create clarity amongst our respected He-Man fans, I would like to explain the process and objectives of the Designed @Mattel Volume 1 (He-Man) book that was sold at Comic Con 2009.

I would like to first thank all the fans for their interest in the book and all the brands we have the privilege to work on here at Mattel.

The book was designed and developed internally at Mattel as a gift. This gift was to celebrate the amazing design talent on the team here at Mattel. The gift gave us the chance as artist to raise money for the incredible foundation of “Make a Wish”. It was an opportunity to share some of Mattel’s great art with our dedicated and passionate fans.

As part of this project we needed to consider our corporate responsibility as a design team, which comes with limitations. One of those limitation was the number of books we where allowed to produce as well as the price we needed to sell the book for in order to make a significant contribution to “Make A Wish”.

The Design team appreciates Mattel’s support in delivering the book and the wide group of Mattel employees that volunteered their time to help make the book happen.

I hope this adds a bit of clarity to our process and I look forward to the opportunity to deliver Volume 2, Design @Mattel and more exciting product for next years Comic Con.

Best Regards,

Dave

Unfortunately, the most important question–why did they only produce 1,000 copies?–isn’t really addressed. I read a post by someone on RTM suggesting it might be something related to taxes based on charitable contributions, but whatever the answer is, this message skirts the issue and everyone knows it. While I can understand how the price of the art book affects their charitable contributions to Make-A-Wish, I don’t know why it would be limited.

And naturally, one can’t help but think: wouldn’t selling more books have made more money for Make-A-Wish? Resaurus was able to do something similar in the late 1990s; they made a unique action figure, Razor, which was designed by a young Make-A-Wish recipient, and Resaurus was able to get them mass produced and into stores to raise money for MAW.

Obviously, I applaud Mattel for helping out a charity. And if this was indeed planned beforehand, I’ll even give kudos to them for not trying to capitalize on it PR-wise. But as of right now, the whole thing is still pretty mystifying, and this latest message doesn’t clear up much beyond the price question (which didn’t bother fans nearly as much as the lack of availability). It almost feels as if Mattel is underestimating the fans. Just give us a straight answer: why was the book’s run limited to 1,000 copies when there was clearly strong enough fan interest for a run of at least 3,000-5,000 (preferably available via Mattycollector)? “Because we had to consider our corporate responsibility” is not an answer; “because of  the terms of the contracts we signed with the artists for royalties, we could only afford to print 1,000 copies” is.

Then there’s this about the Fwoosh Gleek contest:

I can already hear the urban myths and rumors starting.

To ensure we had product to sell each day of SDCC, we divided product up by day so that fresh cases would be brought in each day. We knew from day one that we would have more Wonder Twins than Gleeks at the show and would sell out of Gleeks before the Wonder Twins sold out. And we did advertise this multiple times online and on message boards.

What we didn’t count on was one box of Gleeks getting buried in the stock room and not turning up until Sunday when we had sold out of both WT sets and Gleeks. Suddenly we were faced with a problem. We had a box of 100 Gleeks and no WT sets left. What to do?

In an effort to get these to fans, we arranged with a fan site (Fwoosh in this case) to distribute these Gleeks to fans after the show. We could have just kept this box and not told anyone and no fan would have known, but we had them and I wanted to get them out there. Fwoosh had a plan and it seemed like a good way to work with the fan community.

That’s the whole story. There is no agenda, it is as simple as one box getting misplaced and turning up after Wonder Twin sets had sold out.

And now you know the whole story!

Matty

This time, my question is: why did they need to get the Gleeks out of there so fast, rather than sitting on them a bit and coming up with a less haphazard-seeming plan? No offense to the fine folks at Fwoosh, who seem to have handled the contest well, but given the delicate nature of PR relations with fan and collector sites, I think it would have been wiser for Mattel to take the fansites out of it and hold their own contest on Mattycollector or their Facebook page.

Just to be clear: I’m not criticizing Mattel’s decision to give away the extra Gleeks. What I’m criticizing is the way they went about it, and pointing out that it may have hurt them as much as helped them (from a PR perspective). When I read that note above, my first reaction wasn’t, “Oh, well that explains it,” or “Well, it’s not what I would have done, but at least the Gleeks are out there.” It was, “They misplaced a hundred Gleeks? Seriously?” This may be a case where Mattel would have been better off not trying to explain and just waiting out the furor.