- Ad Age, Monday, July 24, 2006 12 PM
Simon Dumenco trashes a marketing effort from the Magazine Publishers of America marketing campaign in
Ad Age. At issue is a "dork-ass faux comic-book character" called "Captain Read," who went
around to media-buying agencies to hand out fact sheets for "Magazine Accountability Week." Dumenco remembers living in Baltimore when activists "tried to counter the city's (deserved) reputation for
illiteracy by slapping the slogan 'BALTIMORE READS!' on bus shelters next to a pictogram stick figure shown reading a book." Thankfully, "quick-thinking graffiti artists sprayed 'BREEDS' over 'READS'
on the signs all over town and drew huge bellies on the stick figures to underscore the city's other big embarrassment: sky-high teen-pregnancy rates." Of course, Captain Breed would make perfect
sense for the magazine industry right now, Dumenco concludes, noting the "number of idiotic celebrity weekly stories about (real or imagined) starlet pregnancies."
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