Wednesday, March 28, 2007
Marketers, Gingerly, Bite at Parody Bait
AT a recent photo shoot in the garment district, Joshua Neuman was dressed all in white, except for a black bowler hat and black combat boots. He wore fake eyelashes on his right eyelid, and held a cane in one hand, a glass of milk in the other.
It was a homage to Stanley Kubrick’s “A Clockwork Orange,” with a twist. Mr. Neuman, the editor and publisher of Heeb Magazine, the 5-year-old quarterly magazine marketed to urban Jews in their 20s and 30s, also wore a fake beard and the type of fringed prayer shawl worn by Hasidim.
“It’s a bit of the old ultra-Hasidic violence,” he said. Then, he asked the photographer, David Neff, “Should I be stroking my beard?”
When it was introduced in 2002, the magazine, particularly its name playing on an anti-Semitic slur, drew headlines and the ire of the Anti-Defamation League. “When we started, we didn’t have advertisers and literally couldn’t give ads away, because people were freaked out by the name,” Mr. Neuman said.
So Heeb started running parody ads. Unbeknownst to Streit’s, the 82-year-old kosher foods company on Rivington Street on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, Heeb published a full-page parody of Streit’s in late 2003.
“We were just goofing off,” Mr. Neuman said. But then, Streit’s got so much positive response from the ad that the company paid to run it in the next issue, and has been paying for ads ever since.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/28/business/media/28adco.html?ref=business
AT a recent photo shoot in the garment district, Joshua Neuman was dressed all in white, except for a black bowler hat and black combat boots. He wore fake eyelashes on his right eyelid, and held a cane in one hand, a glass of milk in the other.
It was a homage to Stanley Kubrick’s “A Clockwork Orange,” with a twist. Mr. Neuman, the editor and publisher of Heeb Magazine, the 5-year-old quarterly magazine marketed to urban Jews in their 20s and 30s, also wore a fake beard and the type of fringed prayer shawl worn by Hasidim.
“It’s a bit of the old ultra-Hasidic violence,” he said. Then, he asked the photographer, David Neff, “Should I be stroking my beard?”
When it was introduced in 2002, the magazine, particularly its name playing on an anti-Semitic slur, drew headlines and the ire of the Anti-Defamation League. “When we started, we didn’t have advertisers and literally couldn’t give ads away, because people were freaked out by the name,” Mr. Neuman said.
So Heeb started running parody ads. Unbeknownst to Streit’s, the 82-year-old kosher foods company on Rivington Street on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, Heeb published a full-page parody of Streit’s in late 2003.
“We were just goofing off,” Mr. Neuman said. But then, Streit’s got so much positive response from the ad that the company paid to run it in the next issue, and has been paying for ads ever since.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/28/business/media/28adco.html?ref=business
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