Two Almost Entirely Blank Pages in Today's New York Times Are a Movie Ad

Less is more

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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.

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