PressEthic

It’s no news that advertising is a huge part of any publication. Visually, it’s seen on every page, though it’s usually pretty easy for readers to gloss over. The exception is when advertisers and editors try for something cheeky, like in the recent case for one Oregon newspaper.

Apparently, for a few weeks in October, The Register-Guard ran an advertisement for a surgical unit at a local hospital that consisted of a color photograph of a bandaged finger, placed as though sticking out of the newsprint.

Jim Upshaw, wrote yesterday in the paper’s Opinion section:

"The laser surgery promoted in the ad is less invasive than most; the ad itself was the opposite. It protruded into a political report from Minnesota, the lines of news type carefully adjusted to wrap around the finger. The commercial finger slid more than four column inches deep into the paper's primary product, journalism, poking another hole in the metaphorical 'Chinese wall' conceived long ago to separate news from commerce.”

Upshaw went on to note how advertising has always played an influential role in newspapers, but that lately, advertisers have had to work extra hard for readers attention.

"But today, the newspaper business faces worsening strains. As readers move to the Web and advertisers are cutting back print buys, the drive to cultivate remaining ad clients by creatively boosting their businesses grows increasingly intense. While not pleading economic distress, Register-Guard editor and publisher Tony Baker says he found the 'finger' ad appealing when PeaceHealth's advertising agency brought the idea to him.

'It's called a 'dynamic' ad,' Baker told me. 'In the past we would have had some kind of hairline at the top of the ad (to distinguish it from news), or some white space, and not run the news copy down the finger. But I think as we looked at this we said, 'As long as the story's wrapped around the finger, and not related to the ad, this should be OK.' '"

I wouldn’t argue that the ad wasn’t “dynamic.” Though I haven’t actually seen it, from the description given, it actually sounds pretty funny, and thus, catchy and memorable to the readers’ eye. Isn’t that the goal of advertising, you know, those things make printing papers financially possible?

That being stated, I sympathize more with the counterpoint to this issue. Placed directly within the print, the ad is evasive and distracts from the article surrounding it. By treating the article as background for the real eye candy, editors ran the risk of implying that the clever placement of advertisements is more important than the respect of it’s print.