NEW YORK (AdAge.com) -- Yesterday, MediaWorks told you about Bonnie Fuller's MySpace page that, alas, was not real, and in fact had been built by a ... shall we say ... fan. Who was this mystery MySpacer? Well, now we know. Meet Shmuel "Shmuly" Tennenhaus, a 25-year-old former web marketer who says he's the one who built a MySpace page for Bonnie Fuller without her knowledge as part of an effort to be cast on "One Park Avenue," the planned reality show set at Bonnie's employer, American Media.
Shmuel Tennenhaus
His 'desperate attempt'
In addition to setting up myspace.com/bonniefuller, the American Media-wannabe has set up a site at oneparkavenuereality.com about his "desperate attempt" to get on the show. He also sent 100 flowers to Star Price Productions, the company producing "One Park Avenue," along with a tale of a date gone bad in an attempt to showcase what sort of storylines he could bring to the reality show.
His pitch to American Media on why he should be included on the show? "I am a Hasidic Jew with a ton of chutzpa. ... Big P.R. spin to the whole thing."
"Besides the fact that I think I'd be a good character for the show, I want to work," Mr. Tennenhaus said in a phone interview today from Hallandale, Fla.
A former director of business development at jewelry seller Ice.com, he now blogs for Revenews.com, a site devoted to internet business intelligence. (Last summer he appeared on a panel for the Atlanta Interactive Marketing Association titled "Affiliate Marketing: Finding the Perfect Match." You can see pictures here.) Besides his, er, um, unique personality, Mr. Tennenhaus says his web-marketing expertise is another reason American Media should consider him.
"I figured that there has to be something else I could bring to the table," he said. "It dawned upon me that AMI is a very traditional company; the websites look so bad. For AMI and for this new show what I could do is take care of the viral marketing part -- the MySpace, the YouTube part of it."
Safeguarding David Pecker
To hammer home the point about his web skills, he says he's bought the domain name DavidJPecker.com "for" David J. Pecker, American Media's chairman-CEO. As he explains on the first entry of the OneParkAvenue blog: "This way, nobody can abuse his name or the name of his corporation."
Somehow, though, American Media has been unresponsive to his offers of help. The company was also unresponsive to our requests for comment about Mr. Tennenhaus. Go figure.
Asked whether he thinks all of these efforts might be, well, a bit over the top, Mr. Tennenhaus said he doesn't think so. "If this job was, let's say, at Goldman Sachs or some blue chip finance firm, then I would definitely be over the top," he said. "But we're talking a paparazzi magazine. It has a lot to do with the industry and the reality TV genre, where they're specifically looking for outlandish characters."
"Obviously if they would tell me 'Please stop contacting us,' I would drop it in a heartbeat," he said.
