My husband has pissed off the oddest constituency...

[jasminewind]

DH's company has a new ad campaing for the Greater Washington area, dispelling myths, educating people about lesser known aspects of the GrW populace, targeting mostly businesses that might be interested in expanding or relocationg to this area

Comments

[persipone]

Well 1) people will get pissed at *anything*. But 2) I mean, they do kind of have a point. Not that romance readers are hugely discriminated against in society, but it's a totally bullshit stereotype that people who read romance novels on the subway are somehow less enlightened. I, for one, would tend to think that somebody reading Plato's Republic on the subway was a pretentious ass!

It's a very clever idea, but it's also a very inside-the-beltway idea, very rooted in the kind of culture that judges a person on their pleasure reading.

(Funnier would be a man in a suit reading the WSG, open to sports scores, and a ratty student type with a pop magazine covering up the Washington Post front page.)

[jasminewind]

Yeah, but the whole point of being amusing was to provide a not-boring vehicle for communicating some distinguishing charactaristics of the greater DC area's population. I agree, if the point were to simply parody the metro ridership your version would be funnier, but it doesn't serve the point of the ads.

I agree about judging someone who read's Plato on the metro, I personally would have picked something more science-y, a physics or chemistry journal or something like that. But hey, I'm not the marketing guy, I'm a little too literal minded for it.

[shades_of_nyx]

It actually made the NY Times!

[jasminewind]

I've been meaning to follow up with that info, glad you saw it on your own! It was also in the Wash Post and the WP Express, a cheap little rag that is mostly on the metro. He's thrilled that both papers ran the story with the ad pictured, nice extra PR for them!

In the NYT, it was actually going to go on the front page until North Korea decided to test nuclear weapons and bumped it back to page 17!