Why Is Your Name Upside Down?: Stories From a Life in Advertising

Friday, October 20, we’d post the billboard with Bush’s face and Gore’s logo. We’d leave it up over the weekend and we would “fix” it the following Monday with an overlay (banner) announcing a job opening for a proofreader on 123hire.com. If anyone called Adams about the “mistake,” they’d say they were aware of it and would take care of it ASAP.

RACEWYA. The mistake got them front-page coverage in the New York Times and the New York Post. Thanks to all the press, the race sold out and they were never broke again. They misspelled it on purpose. Or at least that’s what they said.”

“You know about Yonkers Raceway in New York?”

“No,” he replied.

“Apparently when that track was completed in the early 1900s, the builders were broke and didn’t have any money to advertise the track. So the day before the first race, they installed ten-foot-tall letters on the entrance facing the highway that spelled YONKERS

“Could you imagine what would happen if someone printed an election sign wrong? Like if they put Al Gore’s face on a Bush for President ad?”

“Now that would get a lot of attention,” Boone said.

“The media loves mistakes,” I said to Boone.