Truth in advertising?
Caught this over at Anne Galloway's site, and I'm not really sure what to think. Seems that Penguin UK has, for better or worse, joined the rest of us in the 21st century in terms of their ad campaigns. I'm not saying that's a good thing, btw. So you visit their site, and are greeted with the following claim: Good Looking Women Want Good Booking Men.
Umm...yeah. After I stopped laughing, I started looking around through the site. I even started taking their online quiz to "find out how Good Booking you currently are." I did make it all the way to page 3, but I couldn't get past the first question thereon:
See how many bona fide authors you can pick out of this lot:
- Alan Cumming
- Hugh Jarse
- Dave Eggers
- Phil McCraichin
- Jack Orff
- Daisy Chaine
- Martin Wank
Yeah, that should give you some clue as to the overall tenor of this particular marketing campaign. If I were Dave Eggers, I'd sure be thrilled to find my name in that list. Anyhow, apparently Penguin's hired a model who will bop around from bookstore to bookstore, giving out 1000 pounds a month to someone who's reading the Book of the Month. Oh, wait. Did I say "reading"?
What women really want is a man with a Penguin. You may not even need to read it, just bend the covers, let it stick out of your pocket and the book will do the talking!
I'm not even going to try and crack wise about "a man with a Penguin." I'll leave that to your imagination. To my own imagination, I'll leave the question of who in their right mind at Penguin thought they could drum up sales by giving their corporate image over to the shallow slackwits in charge of the corporate brand for FHM, Maxim, Stuff, or whatever the hell softcore porn rag "men's magazine" they're obviously emulating.
Did I mention that page 2 of the quiz involves matching book to bosom?
Yikes.