You needn't be the CEO of a newspaper company to know how important advertising is to your existence. But what about the type of advertising that promotes … your newspaper? Maybe that's a crucial lifevest thrown overboard by an industry that stagnated itself into near extinction — and should be implemented, stat..

"When it comes to promoting themselves, newspapers have historically been almost completely uninterested," writes The New Yorker's brilliant "Financial Page" scribe James Surowiecki. "This is especially peculiar when it comes to the Times, which has an exceptional brand (one of the few genuinely powerful and long-lived brands in corporate America, I would argue) and an exceptional product, but which seems to view advertising that product as of only minor usefulness."

But first, Surowiecki's conceit: The Times does advertise itself, with "those klutzy TV ads featuring ordinary people talking about the pleasure they get from reading the Sunday paper or whatever, but those are ads that just about any newspaper could run about itself, and they do very little to build on the distinctive authority that the Times has."

And Surowiecki also forgets the Times relationship with JetBlue, which turns a normal NYC-LA flight into a running advertisement for the Times brand, with the constant plugs for the Times On Air channel. And whenever the iPhone spits out an ad, inevitably the Times' website gets a plug (which also leads to Apple receiving favorable coverage in the Times)

But he's got a point here: "Maybe I’m wrong, but I assume that a significant percentage of political, economic, and cultural movers and shakers are regular readers of the Times. Yet I’ve never seen any of them in an ad for the paper. (Perhaps those ads exist, but if so, I’ve missed them.)"

Pairing our memory with his, the truth reveals itself: Those ads don't exist.

There is a newspaper, however, that does use those. It's The Financial Times. Showcasing young, smart-looking ambitious types, FT ran an ad campaign promoting its newspaper as the must-read for any thinking fella looking to get ahead. Oh—what's that? It was actually an ad campaign from Spring 2007 for the designer label Zenga? And the campaign just featured good looking models pretending the read the Financial Times? Oh, crap.

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