This is a bit off topic, but the “New York Times has an article” saying:

The Aug. 22 issue of “The New Yorker”, due out Monday, will carry 17 or 18 advertising pages, all brought to you by the “Target” discount store chain owned by the Target Corporation. The Target ads will even supplant the mini-ads from mail-order marketers that typically fill small spaces in the back of the magazine. The Target ads, in the form of illustrations by more than two dozen artists like Milton Glaser, Robert Risko, and Ruben Toledo, are to run only the one time in the issue. They are intended to salute New York City and the people who live — and shop — there. Many mainstream magazines like Time and Life have published what are known as single-sponsor issues, carrying ads only from marketers like Kraft Foods and Progressive insurance. Target has been a sole sponsor before of issues of magazines, among them People. The goal of a single-sponsor issue is the same as it is when an advertiser buys all the commercial time in an episode of a television series: attract attention by uncluttering the ad environment.

I bring this to your attention because, if you look around One Degree, you’ll realize that this is pretty much what we want to do. Our contention is that online clutter kills branding opportunities and for highly-targeted sites like One Degree you need to give sponsors lots of space to get their message across. And as readers, we hate the noise that kills the user experience on most ad-supported sites so we’re happy to stand up and show there is another way. If you have examples of sites that you think are doing a great job of integrating ad messages into the overall experience, I’d love to hear about them. Post your examples below or “contact me” directly.

(Oh, and the title is a Friday afternoon test on whether you’re hip to “leet speak”, but of course you already knew that!)

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Originally published at www.onedegree.ca on August 12, 2005.