The Pitch: Playgirl Wants Spitzer Naked

With Ashley “Kristen” Dupre getting all the attention in the fallout of the Spitzer scandal, one media outlet has decided to level the playing field, and in turn score some big time media attention.

Playgirl yesterday issued an “open casting call” to former Governor Spitzer, inviting him to appear nude in the magazine. The letter read in part: “Your political career is sadly over; and you owe a lot of money to a lot of people. Hell, you may land in jail before too long. So consider this letter a brief note of urgency.

How about making some loot back, by showing us what you saved for such a select few? Seriously – get in touch with us. We’re ready to make you a very attractive offer. Someone get Spitzer on the line: Playgirl needs him naked, now.”

Needless to say, the story spread like wildfire, starting at the top with Drudge Report and then appearing in the LA Times, NY Post, Baltimore Sun, Huffington Post, Comedy Central and hundreds of blogs.

We caught up with Playgirl editor in chief Nicole Caldwell by phone today, who gave us some background on how things went down.

Around the motivation for the idea, she says:
We knew that everybody was paying a lot of attention to the girls in these scandals and we knew that if we went after Spitzer it could be good. Of course being at Playgirl it occured to us immediately that we could get in on this game of going after peope to get naked.

When I wrote the letter to him, it was just a matter of getting it seen by enough people that it might get to him. So we wrote this open casting call to him and then sort of just waited to see public reaction. And then it just got leaked to Drudge, that’s the only place.

What happened then?
Within 10 minutes of it getting to Drudge we had 2,500 new hits on the blog, and then it was just a matter of fielding calls from other media. Also, being ready with the next move: what are we going to do when Spitzer’s people call.

The thing is, as far as the publicity stunt aspect goes, we will really put him in the magazine, I swear. While we were having fun with the invitation, we’re for real too.

So what kind of attention have you seen, exactly?
We already more than 10k hits today. Yesterday by midnight we had more than 141k. About 80k came direct from Drudge.

There’s also covereage in the NY Post, Baltimore Sun, LA Times, we spoke to Huffington Post yesterday. Gawker, Jezebel, Indecision 2008 on The Daily Show website and tons of other blogs linked to it.

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