Campaign

Sunday night

My employer came up with a new way to get customers to spend some money, and it would involve portraits of women from the National Gallery of Art. The deal went like this: a potential advertiser could choose one female portrait from its collection to appear in an ad, but some portraits cost more than others. The cheapest ads featured blonde-haired women; brunettes were in the mid-range, and redheads cost the most.

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The idea behind the pricing structure was not that blondes are worthless, or "cheap," but since one sees blondes all the time, those pictures cost less. Redheads are more of a rarity in the population, so their pictures cost more.