The New Yorker Prints Barclays Ad Upside-Down
The New Yorker magazine, famed for its error-free copy and formidable fact-checking department, has printed a special advertising section upside-down and back-to-front in this week’s edition.
The ad was for investment bank Barclays Capital, which itself is being roiled by the ongoing mess in the credit and stock markets.
My desktop scanner isn’t that great, so I can’t give you an image of the full spread. But this section of it shows that the ad, “Part of the Cultural Landscape,” is indeed the wrong way up.
The ad announces Barclay’s sponsorship of photographer Alexandra Hedison’s ‘Ithaka’ exhibition:
We applaud and encourage her unique vision and dedication.
The vision is indeed unique, in the sense that it’s backwards.
Usually, when such mistakes are made, magazines give their clients a “make-good” in the form of running the ad again correctly. Which brings us to irony No. 3: The photo exhibition celebrates the temperate rain forest of the Pacific Northwest. One presumes some other forest will be slightly reduced in order to get it right next week.
Jim Edwards, a former managing editor of Adweek, has covered drug marketing at Brandweek for four years, and is a former Knight-Bagehot fellow at Columbia University's business and journalism schools. Follow him on Twitter or send him an email.
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