Local commuters got a bit of a surprise in – or rather, on – their copy of Metro Boston Monday morning: A four-page Revlon ad that wrapped the actual newspaper.
It featured a front page entirely occupied by a cosmetics ad topped by a Metro Boston banner – just to make it look like a real Page One.
(Which the hardsearching staff couldn’t find an image of, but here’s what the inside spread looked like:)
And here’s the actual Page One of Monday’s Metro Boston:
That same edition featured an ear that extended above the other pages to accommodate a Babson College MBA infosession ad.
As far as we can tell, Metro Boston hasn’t sold off the masthead yet.
But give them time.
Campaign Outsider 
All right folks, we’ve reached the slippery slope. They’ve compromised the sanctity of the Metro Boston. Anything can happen now!
Honestly, the only thing that offends me about all of this (and of course I love all advertising) is how awful the Revlon copy is. A genius brush? Really? It’s a goddamn brush that may work marginally better than other such brushes. And we call it a genius brush in our self-glorifying, onanistic mediocracy.
I’m a fan of Apple products and their customer service is, in fact, a differentiating part of the “Apple experience.” Even then, when they started that Genius Bar bullshit, I thought it was tasteless. But Apple’s Apple, it’s the mass producer of the mainstream counterculture, it’s what you get when you’re Creative and like Neutral Milk Hotel. This, it’s a BRUSH. You put it on your eyebrow (or moustache if you’re Freddie Mercury or Albanian) and that’s it. HOW CAN A BRUSH BE GENIUS???
I know that there are general trends in advertising and sometimes it’s about personal enabling and sometimes it’s about pure happiness and more recently it’s been about intelligent devices and intuitive everything. But any cosmetics manufacturer that has the effrontery to condescend so much so as to call a stupid brush a genius (I have a questionably obtained Master’s degree and even I am only a genius when my mother describes me) has lost my business. And they can stuff their sorries in a sack, Mister!
PS: just so you know, I’m not condoning Apple’s use of that word either.
So, they call that thing that extends above the top of the page, an ear? Let me tell you what I do with those when I get a paper, any paper, that has something like that on it. I tear it off, and throw it away. In the case of the Metro, it gets rolled in a ball and tossed back in the Metro box. The same goes for those extensions (are they called noses when the come from the side) in the Sunday comics, and the stickers plastered on the front of the newspaper. Tear, tear, crumple, crumple, without seeing what they’re pushing..