MOUTHING OFF

The Stranger caught me while I was feeling passionate about the ongoing drama with the 'poster war'.....

CHOP SUEY CUTS TIES WITH POSTER GIANT
Posted by Eric Grandy on June 1 at 15:45 PM

Chop Suey booker Colin Johnson has ended his club’s long-standing business relationship with divisive local company Poster Giant. (For background on Poster Giant and the “poster wars” see here, here, here, here, and here). If an outside promoter “wants to go with Poster Giant I’m not gonna tell them they can’t,” Johnson says. “Anybody who does any show here can go with whoever they want. But when it comes to the in-house production shows we do, we’re not going to work with them.”

According to Johnson, the falling out began when Poster Giant was unable to adequately poster for an outside promoter’s Chop Suey show on two weeks’ notice. Poster Giant’s Doug Cox told Johnson that the company needs for 4-5 weeks lead time for a proper poster campaign, and that Johnson should tell his outside promoters as much. When another outside promoter approached Johnson with a poster only a week and a half before their event, Johnson told them that wouldn’t be enough time for Poster Giant, and the promoter decided to go with Poster Midget instead.

“[Cox] called me up with an ultimatum,” says Johnson. “He basically said, ‘I’m tired of seeing the Chop Suey name on posters that I don’t put out. You’re either with me or you’re not with me.’

Johnson says Cox then threatened to “specifically target any Chop Suey show that [Poster Giant] doesn’t put up” if he didn’t “start getting those customers back.” (Poster Giant has a reputation for targeting the competition. They’ve denied it.)

“We’re not going to go with somebody who’s trying to use scare tactics to retain our business,” Johnson says. “Somebody needs to stand up to it, and that’s what we did.”

“We’ve been around five years,” Johnson adds. “We’ve been working with them since the beginning. I’ve always tried to push Poster Giant to meeting with other poster distributors and kind of coming to a place where they can all stay out of each others’ way and still accomplish what they want to accomplish. But what they do tactically, for their clients, is they go to a pole and, regardless of what’s on there, they’ll take over the entire space. There’s no respect for anybody else’s work, it’s just bottom-line. There’s an ongoing war; it’s Poster Giant versus everybody else.”

“I wouldn’t say that we’ve severed ties [with Chop Suey],” says Poster Giant’s Doug Cox. “I mean, we’re still friends or whatever. I don’t know that they’re going to be using our services in the future or not. That’s up to Chop Suey. We’ll wait and see what happens.”

the article plus feedback can be found here.