Tammi's Manga Imprints Capture Finland's 13-year-olds

The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines manga as "a Japanese comic book or graphic novel." A pretty colorless description for a complex genre. Read back to front, top to bottom and right to left, with conventions for storytelling, style of illustration and even the ratio of text to picture, manga has become a global phenomenon. Although real manga is always from Japan, it has spawned versions in other cultures and inspired designers with its often elegant illustrations. And it's been a hit everywhere from the U.S. to Finland, where Tammi publishes the imprints Sangatsu Manga and Punainen jättiläinen.

"We started seven years ago with Sangatsu, with sales that skyrocketed initially and since then have leveled off but remain strong," says Antti Valkama, manga manager and the brains behind the imprint. Although the two imprints target different audiences - Sangatsu is geared toward 10-16-year-olds and Punainen is for everyone else - the fan base is in fact extremely focused, to say the least. "Our biggest readers are 13-year-olds," says Valkama.

So when Valkama and his colleague Antti Grönlund, who runs Punainen jättiläinen, wanted to reach their core readers, they needed to find a spot where 13-year-olds hang out. "We ended up choosing Habbo Hotel," says Valkama. "It's a social site that's particularly popular with young teens right now." Valkama and Grönlund ended up sponsoring a room with a "billboard" with links to the Tammi manga website, which already had some 8,000 registered users who can buy books, chat and post their own drawings there. Along with sponsoring the room for four weeks, visitors to the room got badges - collecting digital badges is all part of the Habbo Hotel culture - and a special one-hour event was planned with the two Anttis visible as avatars in the sponsored room and available for questions. And boy, were there questions.

"It was crazy," says Grönlund, pointing to a screen-capture showing a crush of 13-year-old avatars with the two Antti avatars in the middle. "We couldn't even look at the screen ourselves, we had to have someone here reading off questions from the screen and we just typed in our answers as fast as we could."

The live event attracted plenty of attention at Habbo Hotel - it was displayed on the main page as a top news item - and the whole month-long campaign had the impact that Valkoma and Grönlund had hoped for: a total of 4,799 new members joined the Tammi manga website, with users leaving 981 messages in the site's guest book and a whopping 3,674 messages at the group's forum.

"And at Habbo Hotel, the numbers are even higher," says Grönlund. There were over 37,000 unique visitors to the sponsored room - more than 10 percent of the total visitors to Habbo Hotel during the period. "Plus we had over 28,000 visiting the Tammi manga website - not to mention the 32 million pageviews at Habbo Hotel during the four weeks," he says. Which was the whole reason the two Anttis did it in the first place.

"What's unique to manga is that our core group of readers, these 13-year-olds, have their own way of reading manga," says Grönlund. "Boys read action series and girls read romance - although there are a lot of girls who read the action series as well. But interestingly, boys tend to read by themselves but girls read more as a social activity, in groups and drawing in their friends. What's hard for us is that by the time they're 15, we often lose them. So we are constantly having to reach a new group of 13-year-olds."