Marketing the Midnight Release

“Billboards. Baseball parks. A countdown in Times Square. Scholastic, Inc., the U.S. publisher of J.K. Rowling’s mega-selling children’s series, has planned a $3 million-$4 million marketing campaign, more than doubling its budget for the release of the last Potter book, “Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire,” in 2000,” reports CNN.com. One might ask why it’s necessary to spend millions when the book is already so highly anticipated, but Michael Jacobs, the senior vice preident of Scholastic, says: “You can never take anything for granted. There’s a lot of noise in the world and you have to do everything you can to get attention, especially after a three-year wait.”