PressEthic

If anyone caught am New York over the weekend, here’s the first thing they saw: a giant T-Mobile ad that stretches from the front cover around to the back cover. It’s three-quarters image, one-quarter text, with ads on the inside covers as well. Below the am New York logo on the front cover, there’s a brief explanation: “promotional front page, inside covers, and back page.”

In the free daily biz, they call this the “wrap.”

According to Richard Oceguera, Metro’s national sales director, his paper developed the concept—“The Metro Wrap”—in Stockholm, Sweden, when it launched 10 years ago.

The concept was simple: better ad visibility, better branding, higher revenue streams. You get the point. The question, of course, is how much a front-page ad really matters. While I tend to think a lot of readers don’t take free-dailies as seriously as, say, the Post or the Times —and perhaps think of them more as ad-space than anything else—that’s not really the point. Despite their emphasis on a twenty-something demographic and on an incredibly curt story length, Metro and am New York are still newspapers, and a newspaper’s front page is still the print medium’s bread and butter. So it’s a tad jarring to see it devoted to hawking that latest cell phone technology.

According to Oceguera, other types of papers have dabbled in front-page marketing. But his example (Daily News promoting a local school) was relegated to a community-oriented sponsorship. And that, of course, is an entirely different concept. The idea of running-a-full-front-and-back-page-advertisement-like-it’s-any-other-advertisement seems to be a trend more or less confined to the small but growing universe of free dailies.

Oceguera also said that there hasn’t been any bad blood between Metro’s editorial and advertising departments. He said that wraps are looked at “in a positive light” by everyone on the staff—regardless of their department. “It’s like a plastic bag on the Saturday New York Times,” he said.

Taylor Hughes, Metro’s promotions manger, added that the two departments are like “church and state.”

Quick, a free daily in Dallas, also runs wrap ads, but hasn’t experienced that degree of editorial compliance. Renee Benson, a sales rep. at Quick, said “[the editorial department] doesn’t like them, but they’re an almost necessary evil.”

Other free dailies, like the Chicago Tribune’s Red Eye and the Washington Post’s Express don’t run wraps. For Red Eye, it’s never come up, but the Post doesn’t want to lessen its editorial credibility. Kevin Dammeyer, a sales rep at Express, said his paper would “never” run wrap ads.

“We don’t want to compromise our front cover for advertising,” he said. “Our front page is for editorial content exclusively.”