This campaign is a major one –costing $50 million — launched ahead of the annual NAA meeting in Chicago first week of April.

Yes, it is unintentionally Pythonesque, and, oh, it does give us the feeling of the life is being squeezed out of the industry some of us love.

“Destination, not Distraction,” is an interesing choice. It’s increasingly clear that in fact news companies’ own websites, their “destination” sites, are in fact not an essential part of community life — essential in the way the papers have long been. Too much of the industy is stuck in a destination mindset, as if this is time of Andrew Carnegie and not Sergei Brin. The old mindset of vertical integraton, and forcing reader customers to come to “destination” sites is working poorly and less well over time. It’s hard for the industry to come to an inescapable conclusion: it must figure out a new compact with Googles and Yahoos, one that acknowledges who has the eyeballs and who has the content, and what’s fair compensation.

Getting to a finish line with them won’t be easy, but such campaigns as this are but distractions on the road to getting there.

Putting a photograph of a beanie on top of the same clip art you’d find in a Trader’s Joe catalog hardly rates as Pythonesque.

Worse, from a graphic standpoint, the presentation features a big, centered block of absolutely nothing. Your eye just falls into that blue sky, and is only occasionally distracted by the pointlessly looping hand nearby.

If they had any faith in that almost meaningless slogan, it should have been floating in big, chunky, Gilliamesque block letters in the sky, where there is now only an empty blue field. But the look seems to be at odds with the slogan, anyway, doesn’t it? Presumably, by “distraction” they mean web advertising, most of which generally looks more targeted and effective than that mess.

If they were set on Pythonesque, they should have pasted together old clown images and made clear that the carnival presentation represented a waste of their advertising dollars on the internet, then work the rest of the ad’s graphics in such a way to show more normal people showing interest in newspaper advertising. I may not be a big fan of newspapers, but I do think there’s a reasonable pitch, there… they just failed to make it.

Talk about not getting it…

Then I saw the “Why was Freedom of the Press so important to the Founders? Maybe it was the coupons” ad and realized that this campaign is damning - it’s far too juvenile to take seriously the people who would be receptive to it (the best article I remember reading on such people was Joseph Epstein’s “Are Newspapers Doomed?” in Commentary magazine, but you have to pay to get it).

Third-hand reports from the NNA convention say that this campaign is supposed to emulate Monty Python in order to get the 18-34 set interested.

Success of the broadway revision of “Holy Grail” has gathered an entirely new generation around the antics of the Python troupe so the association is trying to use pop culture to attract readers.

That’s the thinking, anyway.