Hasta La Creative!

Sometimes a mistake is so embarrassing, it cycles all the away around the shame circle and becomes kind of awesome.

Today’s case in point: Kyrzbekistan, a country accidentally invented by a New York Times piece that meant to reference the Central Asian nation Kyrgyzstan.

In fairness, the story is otherwise quite compelling and dramatic, telling how a climber escaped captivity by shoving an armed militant off a cliff. Unfortunately, the newspaper accidentally portrayed the events as happening in Kyrzbekistan, which has the unfortunate distinction of not being real.

“An earlier version of this article misidentified the country whose army chased Tommy Caldwell’s kidnappers,” notes the newspaper’s online correction. “It was Kyrgyzstan, not Kyrzbekistan, which does not exist.”

Or at least, it didn’t exist before. Today it has its own Twitter feed and a Fodor’s Guide worth of sarcastic tweets.

Beyond the parody account, the mockery has already begun to roll in:

Rumour has it that #Kyrzbekistan has been given the go-ahead to enter Eurovision 2015.

— deedee (@del_souky) January 8, 2015

We Austranians don’t like Kyrzbesistanis ever since they have sided with Luxemstein in the United States Of Amigos question #Kyrzbekistan

— Martin Hovezak (@MirrorOfMirrors) January 8, 2015

I suppose, if all nations are “imagined communities”, the NYT making one up just took that to its logical conclusion. #kyrzbekistan

— Oliver Bullough (@OliverBullough) January 8, 2015

You can’t just will a country out of existence… Stand up for #kyrzbekistan!

— Lew Ayotte (@LewAyotte) January 8, 2015

The media revolution has come full circle.

To promote Inside Llewyn Davis as Hollywood awards season ramps up, CBS Films paid The New York Times a lot of money to run a full-page print ad on Saturday consisting of mostly white space and an abbreviated version of a tweet from Times movie critic A.O. Scott praising the Coen Brothers' folk-singer flick. "I'm gonna listen to the Llewyn Davis album again. Fare thee well my honeys," said Scott's tweet.

After the ad ran, Scott wrote, also on Twitter:

we have reached a strange new place in marketing when tweets become full-page print ads.

— a. o. scott (@aoscott) January 4, 2014

Why bother abbreviating a tweet for a print ad, you might wonder? Because the rest of the tweet name checked The Wolf of Wall Street and American Hustle:

You all keep fighting about Wolf of Wall St. and Am Hustle. I'm gonna listen to the Llewyn Davis album again. Fare thee well, my honeys.

— a. o. scott (@aoscott) December 31, 2013

According to Mashable, the Academy considers it a no-no for movie ads to mention the work of competitors.

It's a good strategy insofar as it'll earn more attention than the run-of-the-mill movie ad quoting a gushy critic. Beyond the buzz it invites among marketing and social-media geeks, who are sweating whether the use violates Twitter's rules by including content from the platform in advertising without the author's permission, it's really just another newspaper ad—meaning nobody really knows how effective it will be.

The studio's execs missed an opportunity to amp up Twitter enthusiasts further, though, by throwing an "MT" into the layout. Maybe they worried that most of the audience reading the Times in print barely knows what a Twitter is anyways.

The New York Times took some heat from readers on Monday for allowing an online ad showing a bloodied man lying on the ground to appear next to coverage of the bombings in Boston. The ad, for the Sundance Channel show Rectify, received enough criticism that the paper's public editor, Margaret Sullivan, weighed in with a piece Wednesday—giving some background and confirming that the paper did indeed approve the juxtaposition, and that it wasn't just some oversight. "This did not feel like it crossed the threshold," the Times's ranking advertising executive, Todd R. Haskell, tells Sullivan. Haskell says that by Monday, it had been a full week since the bombings, which made the ad more acceptable. "We try to be as respectful as we can but these are subjective calls that we make in real time," he adds. (The show premiered Monday, which also made it more difficult to move it to a later date.) Sullivan ends up agreeing with Haskell and with Richard J. Meislin, a former associate managing editor who now is a liaison between the newsroom and the ad department, who said he thought the juxtaposition was "unfortunate, but it did not cross the line to the point where we would ask that the ad be taken down." What do you think?