Miami Herald devotes its front page to Red Bull publicity stunt [UPDATED x1]

UPDATED at 7:50pm: John Landsberg, a Kansas City "media relations and marketing consultant specializing in publicity, media training and crisis communications," tweets:

Love Red Bull stunt. Embarrassed for Miami Herald. ow.ly/9ox5T
— John Landsberg (@BottomLineCom) March 1, 2012

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Click here to enlarge.

Did you see all the ads on the Miami Herald's front page today?

There's the ad at the bottom of the page for South Motors. And, if you missed that, there's the smaller ad for South Motors in the upper right hand corner of the page.

Is that it?

Not quite.

See that large photograph in the center of the page?. That's also an ad.

To commemorate "Leap Day", the folks at Red Bull came up with a stunt they hoped would get them some free publicity press coverage.

Red Bull arranged to have base jumpers "leap" from four tall buildings in Miami, Detroit, Las Vegas and Atlantic City.

The Detroit jump was cancelled because of high winds.

But, the stunts went off as planned in the other three cities, including Miami.

But, only Miami Herald editors considered the stunt newsworthy; devoting a good part of the Thursday's front page to photo coverage of the jump.

(There's also a slide show on the Herald website.)

And, over at the Red Bull Public Relations HQ, they probably haven't stopped high-fiving each other. I'm sure in their wildest dreams, they never imagined their cheesy publicity stunt would actually end up on the front page of a major daily newspaper.

But, if I'm the ad manager at South Motors, I'm wondering why I have to pay to have my ad run in the paper, when Red Bull gets their ad published for free.