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Interview: Mike Tatsugawa Aug. 15

The marketing aspect of the convention was clearly a marketing success. We brought in far more attendees for the concerts than we first imagined.

The other sides of the convention - cars, wrestling, Asian cinema, etc., are still being developed. We hope that in a few years we will diversify out from the shadow of anime and be able to present a distinct product to the US market.

Personally, I won't consider the convention to be a success until I start hearing stories about people who come for one reason and discover two or three new interests by the time they leave.

In Southern California, with its diverse population, music from Asia will always be popular.

Whether the model can be duplicated in other markets is the larger question.

However, when we developed the concept for PMX, we knew that we had a competitive advantage with our local demographics,

What we also managed to pull in was the large base of Japanese people who live in Southern California, a group that traditionally does not go to conventions.

Given that the concert turn-out was higher than the convention turn-out, we suspect that there was only 25% overflow between the two events. Even this is conjecture because a lot of fans were untrackable due to the box office and ticketweb handling most of the concert ticket transactions.

When we started Anime Expo, we sought to create a community for the anime fans and to create an anime industry. We feel that this goal has been largely accomplished. With Pacific Media Expo, we wanted to take a different approach - we wanted to create a convention to serve the community.

Once we stabilize, we would like to begin giving grants to promote artists in the Asian American community in the US and showcase their work at PMX.

...The sheer complexity of the concert would have required a significant increase in the price of admission to the convention.

We felt it would be unfair to PMX attendees who could not attend the concert to include the concert cost in the convention price.

We also felt that it would discourage local TMR fans from attending PMX if they were forced to also pay for the cost of convention admission when they purchased their tickets.

For the other lower cost music events, we will continue to offer free admission with the cost of membership.

...Feature TMR when he'd already performed at Otakon?
We were partnering with Sony Music Japan on this event and T.M.Revolution was the best fit we could find. Other mitigating factors were also involved in the planning, but in the end, we believe that this was the best choice. As time moves forward, there will probably be additional musicians who have fewer ties to anime titles.

...Did Silver Ash not show?
From our understanding, due to the threat of Cuban terrorists disguised as musicians, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, which recently took over the U.S. Immigration Service, began to tighten up on performer visas, right around the time of the Latin American Grammies in Florida. As a consequence, there was a 4-6 month backlog on performer visa requests. That Silver Ash was coming from a Communist country probably did not help either. Even with expedited service, Homeland Security still could not process the request in time.

Wrestling?
New Japan Pro Wrestling is a popular wrestling federation in Japan. A mutual associate introduced the two of us and we felt that all forms of entertainment from Asia should be represented at PMX.

Will there definitely be a PMX 2005?
We are finalizing the contracts as we speak. We are tentatively scheduled for Labor Day weekend of 2005. The city is still in question.

We are concerned about the music overlap with AnimeFEST, and we have great respect for them as one of the groundbreakers in the music market. We hope that there is a possibility that we could arrange for split musical artists, just like we did with Fanime this year.

We interviewed multiple attendees and found that the students were running back and forth from school related commitments like finals and graduation ceremonies.

We also polled the older attendees and found that they had lost interest in watching videos many years ago.

A lot of the old dogs had to learn new tricks to adapt to the new world of music and a lot of the staff gave 110%, even to the point that we had a problem with a lot of the staff continuously shelling money out of their pockets to make the convention a better experience for the attendees and staff.

I like how he refers to anime as a "shadow", when it's as much of a pop culture phenomenon in Japan as the entertainment he described.

So much for having more responsible accounting than AX.

Real answer: "Don't worry! The karaoke room will still be free!"

Real answer: "We couldn't afford them."

He wants to be able to promote cars and wrestling and such without relying entirely on anime tie-ins to attract people.

I have no reason not to trust Mike on that one. If you're going to make an accusation like that, you better back it up.

Why? You don't see anime cons rejecting Marvel and DC readers and Disney fans. (In fact, AX now advertises on certain buses.) If he wants PMX to make money, he has to attract whoever it'll appeal to, and if that appeal has a cross-over affect, so be it. He wants to compete with AnimeNorth and AnimeFEST, but he doesn't actually want to provide any incentives for people who attend those cons to visit PMX instead. It's just bad business.

I was just joking. Although you've got to wonder where he gets the money to invest in that much space...

but I think Mike sees anime as a stigma that j-pop and HK films and such need to escape in order to reach a different(/larger?) audience.

Perhaps he just wants to build a fan base for Asian entertainment from the ground up.

And hey, if Japanese pro wrestling takes off, he could corner the market and make more than if he'd stayed in anime.

We could also say that he's just bitter and driven by revenge to be bigger and better than AX...but it's pretty hard to base that argument in reality.

You know, sometimes I just can't tell.

Otakon had the same issues with Ticketmaster a couple of weeks ago.

No Ticketmaster for Otakon.