It was a final gasp effort to save the popular sassy magazine for the modern girl. It failed, but it failed fucking magnificently .
Jane placed the ads in trade publication Women's Wear Daily, but the campaign could easily have doubled as a big consumer effort (which publisher Jane Pratt, unfortunately, didn't have the money for).
Luckily for you, I scanned almost all of them, because they're now hard-to-find internet collectors items.
The marketing positioning was sly: the first ad's (the only one I didn't scan, dammit) headline was:
She's read Kafka.
She's memorized Zoolander.
A week later, the above dichotomous execution ran.
And the two month media buy was off and running.