In a pretty funny whoopsie that also serves as a weird illustration of how the business of making television works, The New York Times accidentally published a placeholder ad for Showtime’s George & Tammy today that was full of fake review quotes from real outlets. “A masterpiece,” Collider did not say. “Brilliant… enlightening,” is a made up line that is not from The Wall Street Journal. “Intense storyline,” is a fake quote from Deadline that also reads like an awkward edit, as if Deadline had actually said “the intense storyline does not make up for the lousy yadda yadda” and Showtime only wanted you to know that vaguely positive part. But nope! It’s all made-up!
In today’s edition, as noted by Deadline, the New York Times also published the right ad with actual quotes (and a note saying the previous ad was “an error” with “incorrect quotes”). Deadline says the bad ad was “the result of a communications breakdown of sorts,” with Showtime’s marketing people submitting a fake ad as a placeholder for the paper (which is apparently commonplace, though there is something depressing about marketing people attributing fake quotes to real outlets rather than just saying “Blah blah blah -The Whatever Times.”)
That placeholder was then mistakenly published in lieu of the real one, and since it takes a long time to print a physical newspaper, they still had time to A.) notice it and B.) print the real one. But the wrong one is also there, because that’s how newspapers work. You can’t just hop into the CMS and move things around like on a website. Hell, you can’t even immediately throw together a slideshow of other embarrassing ad moments to run alongside the fake ad! Slideshows take up an enormous amount of space in a physical newspaper, after all. Another… win for digital media!
Deadline’s sources say that “people” at Showtime have not responded to the wrong ad being run, but sources say that they’re “pretty red faced and P.O.’d” about it. We also heard from a reliable source (the paper of record, a.k.a. the old gray lady) that some of those fake quotes are also “brilliant... enlightening.”