Buying pricey paid media in the New York Times is not often, to my mind, a highly effective use of philanthropic dollars. But the John Templeton Foundation got its money's worth in a recent two-page spread that asked leading scholars and practitioners, "Will Money Solve Africa's Development Problems?"

The big ad (which the NYT ran at least a couple of times last weekend) worked because it it did not come off as a simple positioning piece for Templeton's views on the matter -- it communicates those without stopping there. Just as it appears on the site, the ad simply asked the question and listed eight different (and differently reasoned) viewpoints in response, which included some responses we've heard before (William Easterly, Ashraf Ghani) and some that fall outside the standard "pro-poor v. pro-market" debates that we hear regularly. On this front I very much enjoyed Michael Fairbanks' thoughts, which begin, "I thought so..." I relate to his objections to "checkbook development" for the same reasons I relate to objections to overspending on the U.S. military: "when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail."

Now, it must be acknowledged that Templeton is clearly looking to undermine the foreign aid paradigm with this ad. But there are plenty of organizations looking to do that. What intrigued me enough about this ad to want to pass it on to friends and colleagues was the fact that I felt I'd been invited into a symposium in broadsheet -- not bashed over the head with pitiful images or shocking statistics of waste. The whole experience felt positively high-brow; perfectly suited for its distinguished vehicle, The New York Times.

A case study for communicators.