NewsDesigner reports that one of the newspaper industry’s responses to sagging ad sales is adscapes.

‘Adscapes’ are the latest look in newspaper advertising. No longer are newspaper ads relegated to squares and rectangles. Today, advertisers can attract attention with a variety of shapes and sizes.

adscape adscape

More examples in this PDF.

The thread features some designers complaining about the trend but commenter Robert Kruger counters:

Why do you think ad reps find it hard to sell the space they already have? Because newspapers are BORING. These new ads are an attempt to change that, to bring a little STYLE into a space dominated by little people stuck in their little boxes. Newspaper subscriptions aren’t down simply because of the internet, bad writing, and bias, they’ve also gone down because of the rigid aesthetic thought, as shown by the designers kvetching here.