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Spawn creator gives Thunderbird students secrets of his successSpawn creator gives students secrets of his success

Spawn creator Todd McFarlane knows he’s hitting his target audience when people such as clergymen, political activists and soccer moms call his companies to complain about the latest toy, video game or music video.

McFarlane has turned a comic book character he first doodled in high school into a multimillion dollar franchise by selling hip products to a different crowd that other toy manufacturers simply ignore, he told students Jan. 13 at Thunderbird School of Global Management in Glendale, Ariz.

“The sweet spot is the college crowd,” McFarlane told the students. “How do you sell toys to 22-year-olds?”

McFarlane’s presentation came during a two-week seminar on global entrepreneurship led by Thunderbird Professor Steven Stralser, Ph.D., a faculty member at the Walker Center for Global Entrepreneurship. Texas entrepreneur Scott Walker, the center’s namesake, kicked off the seminar Jan. 12 with a description of his latest venture, a bottle and tube filling plant near Dallas.

Other “Winterims,” which Thunderbird runs each year between the fall and spring trimesters, took students to places such as Brazil, China, Jordan and New York City.

McFarlane told the students in Glendale that he looked at other toy manufacturers in 1994 when he decided to enter the market and saw everyone competing for the same crowd: Children between the ages of 5 and 8, and their moms.

“When you’re looking at the landscape of business, very easily you see where the crowds are,” said McFarlane, a Canadian who grew up in the United States and eventually settled in Phoenix.

McFarlane said he took the advice of Willie Keeler, a baseball player from 1892 to 1910 who had a simple formula for success: “Hit ’em where they ain’t.”

So McFarlane decided to sell nontraditional toys and other products in nontraditional markets using nontraditional methods. McFarlane caught people’s attention in 1999 with one of these nontraditional methods, when he paid nearly $3 million at auction for baseball slugger Mark McGwire’s 70th home run ball.

McFarlane said people still associate his name with the purchase, and sports league executives suddenly paid attention to him. He said he had been trying for months to negotiate contracts with the National Football League, National Basketball Association, National Hockey League and Major League Baseball to manufacture licensed action figures of popular athletes.

Shortly after he added the 70th home run ball to his McGwire collection, he had contracts with all four leagues. “If you do the math,” McFarlane said, “the investment has paid off many times over.”

Today, McFarlane produces music videos and other entertainment products in addition to toys, comic books and a variety of other pop culture products. Most of his customers are males between the ages of 15 and 50.

Spawn, his signature comic book character from the pits of hell, appealed naturally to this audience. “I live in a pop culture world,” McFarlane said. “So that was an easy opening for me to go into.”

To read more about McFarlane’s history and his Thunderbird presentation, visit the Thunderbird Knowledge Network.