Hasta La Creative!

Here's a pretty expensive way to say (almost) nothing: Buy two consecutive pages in the A section of The New York Times, and leave them completely blank except for a tiny URL in 12-point type at the bottom of the second page.

That's what you'll find in today's paper—and it turns out it's an ad for a movie.

The URL, wordsarelife.com, links to a microsite for the upcoming film The Book Thief. The innovative ad ties into the message of the movie's larger ad campaign, "Imagine a world without words," and the film itself, which is about a young girl in Nazi Germany who steals books from war-torn areas and shares them with others.

Twentieth Century Fox approached the Times with the ad concept, and it was approved by the paper's ad standards team. Impressively, it doesn't even feature an "Advertisement" stamp, which you might expect to be added to reassure readers that it's not a printing error.