Buy Our Product, You Stupid Dumb ****

Newsweek has been my favorite, over Time, for many years. Perhaps starting when ad genius (really) Dick Orkin did a series of ads for Time magazine which showed the non-subscriber as a jerk. Then he urged us to sign up for the magazine. I thought, “Therefore, he’s calling me a jerk. I’m going to support this? Not.”

There are just *so many* ads in which the potential customer is not playing with a full deck, or less than a luminary. I’d rather be identified with someone who is reasonably intelligent and could use a little encouragement to use a product.

Clarabelle the Clown taught me how to brush my teeth on the old Howdy Doody tv show; Hugh Conover intelligently talked about the quality of Skippy peanut butter on “You Asked for It.” When they treat me with respect, I consider their product seriously.

But I won’t be talked down to. I don’t need someone to tell me that I’m the smartest consumer they’ve ever met (hide your wallet), but just try hard to avoid having stupid people in the ads. I know I won’t put up with it; I haven’t yet and I doubt I’ll change much in the future.

Everybody has a story.
Raymond Bauman passed away in a local nursing home. He was plant manager of the nearby International Color and Printing Co., which printed the comics in English and Spanish for over 300 newspapers along the Atlantic Seaboard and Midwestern states, South America and Cuba.