Those Amish are a tricky bunch.

All this time we thought they eschewed modern technology and rolled around town in horse drawn buggies and old-fashioned clothes with no zippers.  And really, they have been singlehandedly saving the advertising industry by marketing their revolutionary new product, the Amish Space Heater.  Full page ads have been placed in such publications as the New York Times, National Geographic and even our venerable San Diego Union-Tribune, not to mention late night infomercials on a variety of cable outlets.

Let’s do a little math on that.  In our local fishwrap, a full page 4-color Sunday ad costs around $80,000.  I’ve counted at least a dozen insertions since I first noted the ad, so 12 x $80,000 = $960,000, and this is in the local San Diego paper alone.

And check out how many Google items turned up on the search terms “Amish Space Heater” — about 376,000 and counting.

Plus there seem to be a number of devotees on YouTube who are playing with the concept, the ultimate compliment.  No worries that the “Amish” are actually building the mantle portion of the heater, and the interior working parts are manufactured by certainly non-Amish workers in China somewhere.

Maybe this is the next Snuggie marketing sensation, and I say more power to them.  If those Amish folk want to infuse a bunch of their cash into the ad industry and help save it from the brink, I say go for it.

And for all the jokes about the simple Amish ways, they are probably laughing all the way to the bank (or the dollar-stuffed mattress as the case may be).

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