When is a print ad both a story and an advertisement?

When the New York Times makes it so!

From Wednesday’s Times Business section:

On Print’s Turf, Google Wins for Creativity

THE winner of a contest to encourage creativity in print advertising, with a grand prize of $1 million worth of full-page ad space in USA Today, is a company that, it can be said, is a reason there are contests to encourage creativity in print advertising with prizes like $1 million worth of full-page newspaper ad space.

The contest, the 2012 USA Today Print Advertising Competition, was announced on Oct. 1, in conjunction with a redesign of USA Today timed to coincide with the newspaper’s 30th anniversary. The winner of the contest is the Google Creative Lab unit of Google, which is known for, among other online innovations, Google News, a free aggregator of the content of newspapers like USA Today.

Irony, thy name is . . . well, you tell us.

Anyway, the winning entry:

Among the runners-up was “the Advertising Council in New York, for an ad from a campaign for Save the Children, which carried the theme ‘Every beat matters.’”

Representative sample in the Times piece:

So imagine our surprise when the hardworking staff saw this in the same day’s News section of the Times:

Apparently, the runner-up no longer waits for the winner’s reign to be interrupted.

Somebody needs to tell Donald Trump.