Dialogue: Potter publicity coup worked just like magic

Hooray for Harry Potter (or Hurrah! Hurrah! as his fictional British forebears would say).

The marketing for the fourth book in the J. K. Rowling series was possibly the best, yet least offensive, campaign for a children's product seen in a long time.

The concept was simple: put kids on a waiting list and start them counting down, plaster a few window stickers on bookstores here and there, and then a carefully timed release smack bang in the middle of the school holidays, and everyone's happy - kids, Mum (who is offered a moment's respite in the hols) and, I guess, Marian Hobbs and co, since the advertising to kids seemed minimal.

Harry Potter didn't need to advertise - he was front page, primetime TV and talkback news. And this sort of clever marketing by way of public relations, insinuating a brand into editorial content rather than brazenly selling it through paid-for advertising, smacks of credibility and worthiness.

But to attribute Harry's success to pure marketing hype is naive. In marketing, if the product's duff, it ain't going to fly. And Harry Potter has literally flown off the shelves.

There are knockers saying these adventures are not well written. But by whose standards, I wonder. Harry Potter has touched kids in a way that a book, toy, or computer game hasn't in a long time.

What do parents love about Harry Potter? He makes them feel like good parents. They breathe a sigh of relief every time their kid picks up a book - phew, we seem to have got something right.

Oh to be able to say, "My kids love to read." Or to boast - "He has a reading age of an 11-year-old at 7" (which I hear all too often).

That's the great thing about sharing books with kids - it's an expedient way to make one feel like parent of the year. Seeing kids quiet in bed and stuck into a book while PlayStation lies forlorn in the corner, leaves parents simply triumphant.

Furthermore, Harry stretches the imaginations of children in ways that modern toys and even many books don't seem to do. We love kids using their imaginations but the mountains of toys and entertainment tools we supply them, seem to immobilise their brains - shutting them down rather than opening them up. Electronic games are two-dimensional, finite and catapult kids into sinister concepts. But Harry Potter creates a world of infinite and fairly positive possibilities.

Making kids experience the countdown to Harry Potter

4's release took Mum and Dad back to their own childhood. These days there is no reason to wait for anything any more other than Christmas. If a product is available the usual routine is that the kids mount a whining campaign until Mum can't stand it any longer, goes to the Warehouse and parts with the cash.

To make kids wait in eager anticipation for a book is both unheard of and healthy.

And what do kids love about Harry? Well, of course, it's always been the ultimate dream to have the magical powers this little wizard and his mates have got.

Then there's that great sense of achievement in tackling and completing a book of more than 600 pages. "I can knock off 100 pages a day," embellished one 9-year-old.

But it's the layers of intricate detail which kids just love and the world doesn't usually have time to deliver. Another astute 9-year-old boy put it simply: "It's better than Goosebumps and those other books because what usually takes two pages to explain, like if he's looking for a stone or something, takes 10 pages in Harry Potter."

Harry Potter will become iconic and J.K. Rowling the Enid Blyton of the dot.com generation. It will be the book series that our kids will want their kids to read, much as Anne of Green Gables and Biggles were to my contemporaries and Peter Pan to our grandparents.

But, alas, the excitement will die a quick and merciless death as soon as Hollywood makes the film and robs kids of their opportunity to fill in the gaps, to keep thinking past the pages and visualise their own Harry Potter adventure fantasies. Until then this book will remain simply the coolest.

Said my nephew, another enraptured fan: "I am up to page 141 and he still hasn't gone to school!"