Cartier approached The New York Times branded content studio, T Brand Studio, with a monumental brief: celebrate the 100th anniversary of the iconic Trinity ring – three interlocking gold rings symbolizing love for family, friends, and romantic partners. The challenge: celebrate Trinity’s heritage while engaging modern, discerning global audiences.
The campaign needed to position Cartier as timeless and relevant, reinforcing its legacy while inspiring a new generation to connect with the brand’s enduring values of love and craftsmanship.

French group Veolia are specialists in ecological transformation with a focus on water, waste and energy management, and one of the world’s leaders in plastic recycling. Despite a shift in consciousness across certain developed markets in recent years, the world’s plastic consumption has increased 200-fold since 1950, and shows no significant signs of abating. When faced by the scale of the problem, it’s easy for both consumers and businesses to feel defeated before even starting to address the issue. There is a high awareness of the level of oceanic plastic waste that already exists, and we’re exposed to negative coverage on a daily basis.

Veolia wants to be a positive voice for a sustainable plastic economy, and understands that in order to drive meaningful change, we must first and foremost be pragmatic — designing a plastic economy that incentivizes and rewards a sustainable approach to plastic use. By collaborating with partners across industries, regions and sectors, Veolia is leading by example to create a circular plastic economy.  Veolia came to The New York Times wanting to create a motivational and solution-focused story that both educates and inspires action, while helping to shift the conversation to a positive and constructive space. Together, we identified three key objectives for that program:

1) Educate: Raise awareness of the global plastic ecosystem and provide a clear picture that makes this complex topic digestible.

2) Inspire: Give Veolia’s target audiences on The New York Times the knowledge and motivation they need to mobilize and take meaningful action.

3) Position Veolia as a thought leader: By spotlighting Veolia’s initiatives, we can demonstrate why Veolia has the authority to own this global story.

The New York Times is dedicated to covering the biggest issues facing the planet today, leading the conversation around our environment. The audiences in Veolia’s key target markets are particularly engaged with environmental and social issues, and want to support brands that are also driving sustainable business practice.

The challenge we uncovered: Consumers want to help tackle our plastic problem, but currently find this topic unmanageable because there is no united, global voice providing a coherent, solution-based strategy.

The Insight: To inspire action on plastic, the world needs a positive vision worth fighting for.

The Opportunity: To combine Veolia’s expertise in plastic recycling with The New York Times’s powerful storytelling and influential audiences, depicting Veolia’s holistic vision for the plastic economy. Our motivational and solution-focused story about plastic puts the consumer at the center to educate and inspire action, while helping to shift the conversation to a positive and constructive space.

The Solution: Together, we developed a cross-platform, integrated partnership that leverages New York Times digital and print platforms in order to distribute content and ensure it’s accessible for all. This was achieved through long-form storytelling, micro-content and a high-impact media campaign, including print, display and sponsorship of our Climate & Environment section.

The long-form storytelling page living on NYTimes.com presented a critical examination of the role that plastic plays in commerce and the economy. We told this story in an originally reported article featuring voices from business, science and government, speaking about the importance of changing our relationship to plastic and how to manage it differently.  The story came to life through bold original animated illustrations inspired by work created in The New York Times newsroom, including a graphic representation of the circular plastic economy. This story was complemented by a mini content unit, which we strategically placed within relevant climate coverage on our website, in which we answered key questions about solutions to plastic management, looking at four key topics that companies would find useful when reducing their plastic footprint. Taking our inspiration from The New York Times’s Q&A explainer approach, we illustrated the solutions available to companies that seek to join the circular plastic economy in order to reduce pollution, encourage local growth, improve design, and raise awareness of the issues at stake. To ensure there was a clear user journey, we enlisted the same art direction and illustrations for all of the content and media in our program.

This partnership was brought to life across a branded content Paid Post program, on-site native units, social media (Facebook, Twitter and Linkedin) traffic drivers and highly impactful 􀃖ex frames. The messaging and impactful illustrations we created for Veolia on The New York Times were a hit with readers, demonstrated by the fact that all CTRs exceeded our prior campaign benchmarks, delivering 163 percent more page views than contracted.

The campaign targeted a global audience, reaching readers in 20 markets around the world, delivering over 23 million impressions and 26,000 page views.

Display media also proved to be effective amongst our readers, with the top performing creative running across the Science, Business, Tech and Health sections of the site, driving a CTR 396 percent higher than benchmark.

The Swiss watchmaker Audemars Piguet came to T Brand Studio to illuminate the brand’s alignment with contemporary art. The brand’s main challenge was to differentiate itself from its competitors through its connection with art, broaden its appeal and open itself up to a wider consumer market, targeting culture and art enthusiasts, affluent individuals, luxury consumers and millennials worldwide. The brand is not widely associated with the arts, despite its investments, and came to The New York Times to increase awareness of this and tell its story.

With this campaign, Audemars Piguet didn’t ‘t want to promote its products directly; rather, it wished to highlight the fine art projects it developed throughout 2019 for Art Basel Hong Kong and the Venice Biennale, and to dovetail these with the launch of the “Audemars Piguet Beyond Watchmaking” exhibition in Tokyo and the premiere of a newly commissioned piece of art, “Data-Verse.”

Through this partnership, T Brand Studio raised awareness of the brand with new and global audiences through original reporting that highlighted the brand’s involvement with contemporary artists . The series, which lived on NYTimes.com, was an effective alignment, reaching The New York Times’s culturally savvy and curious audience.

In order to highlight Audemars Piguet’s artistic credibility, T Brand Studio leveraged The New York Times’s journalistic approach to storytelling by conducting on-the­ ground interviews with artists and creatives associated with Audemars Piguet.

We are creating a series of four highly visual Paid Posts that feature the artistic sensibilities behind Audemars Piguet’s artistic commissions. The first featured the sculptor Fernando Mastrangelo, designer of a unique work for Audemars Piguet shown at Art Basel Hong Kong. The second focused on the conceptual artist Ryoji Ikeda, known for his large-scale audiovisual art, showcasing “Data-Verse,” the work Audemars Piguet commissioned for the Venice Biennale. The third took readers behind the scenes of “Beyond Watchmaking,” the brand’s exhibition in Tokyo. We used both original editorial work and videography to tell these stories.

In the first episode, through a long-form article and original photography, we visited Fernando Mastrangelo in his Brooklyn studio to learn about his relationship with his materials and how his commissioned work spoke directly to Audemars Piguet’s home in Switzerland’s Vallee de Joux. The second episode entered the world of Ryoji lkeda’s “Data-Verse” in a long-form piece incorporating comments from the artist and studded with dramatic images of his work. The third episode contained three videos: one a visit to the “Beyond Watchmaking” exhibition, with voiceovers from Audemar Piguet’s art curators and the commissioned artist Alexandre Joly; one showing the data-visualization artwork of Ryoji Ikeda, featuring voiceovers from the artist and the curator; and one revealing how the “Beyond Watchmaking” exhibition took shape, with voiceovers from the show’s designer and Audemars Piguet.

In developing this series, the fourth episode of which is forthcoming, T Brand Studio centered the narratives on the complexity and precision in the artists’ works, which is reflected in Audemars Piguet’s watchmaking. Through short films, photography and on-the-ground reporting, we shared with our global, culturally savvy audience a lesser-known facet of Audemars Piguet.

Episode 1: https://www.nytimes.com/paidpost/audemars-piguet/ how-a-brooklyn-designer-brought-switzerland-to-hong-kong.html
Episode 2: https://www.nytimes.com/paidpost/audemars-piguet/enter-the-data-verse.html#100000006521328
Episode 3: https://www.nytimes.com/paidpost/audemars-piguet/ beyond-watchmaking.html

The main performance indicators for the client were page views, dwell time and video views of the content and creative campaign. The client bought 62,715 page views across all three episodes, and we delivered 73,326, exceeding the target by 16.9 percent. Overall, the campaign delivered 48,606,980 impressions across all three episodes.

All three branded content videos and editorial articles and stories exceeded our in-house benchmarks and over delivered on booked KPls, including page views. The first had an average engaged time of 1:13 minutes, 28 percent higher than our in-house benchmark, while the second episode had an average engaged time of 1:49 minutes, exceeding the benchmark by 91 percent. The third episode (currently still running) had a 3:33-minute session duration time, almost three minutes longer than the in-house session duration for Paid Posts using the same format (video series).

The first and second episodes exceeded the page views booked by the client, the first by 29.81 percent and the second by 16.67 percent. Media is still running for the third episode, but we’ve already hit and exceeded our target by 3 percent. The overall video completion rate of the three videos created for the third episode is 19 percent higher than our in-house benchmark.

The audience was highly engaged with the social media traffic drivers directing them to the three Paid Posts: All traffic-driving units across Facebook and Twitter exceeded our internal benchmarks. The highest CTR was achieved by Twitter drivers for the second episode; at 9.71 percent, it was more than 17 times higher  than our 0.55 percent internal benchmark .

Back in 2017, UBS launched a successful global campaign focused on driving awareness of Sustainable Investing. However, by the end of the year, the competitive landscape had become saturated with this relatively new theme all with similarly styled content in articles and videos. It was quickly becoming harder to stand out from the crowd as investment banks all over the world threw big media behind their individual efforts to cover the x17 topics ripe for investment within the U.N. Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

The bank’s research showed that while Sustainable Investing was becoming a more familiar term with its audience, there was still a lack of clarity as to what it really meant, how it was relevant to their lives and where to begin. It appeared industry efforts had successfully gotten the audience to notice, but failed to help them understand.

For the next stage in its marketing strategy, this traditional Swiss bank needed to break the marketing mold and stand out from the noise that had been created in the industry whilst providing in-depth education, and understanding of the theme.

Objectives 

1. Position UBS as a thought leader, change driver and expert in financial services.
2. Help the audience understand the term Sustainable Investing .
3. Drive

To be successful, the campaign measurements needed to achieve:

• High visibility for the right audience
• Strong engagement to drive real awareness and education
• Quality traffic to UBS.com to drive consideration

The U.N SDGs include 17 topics for investment, Spark identified the most popular terms and matched them against UBS business objectives to focus the theme. The results were; 1) Health Care, 2) Climate Action, 3) Government and Ethics, 4) Economic Growth and 5) Responsible Consumption.

The New York Times’s T Brand Studio was selected as a partner based on;

• Audience affinity and topic authority – to help showcase UBS as a thought
• Data availability – insights into audience and content consumption within the topics
• Audience reach and variety in formats – To reach readers throughout their daily/weekly news habits we created an omni-channel approach across digital, social, print and
• Content capability – differentiation was crucial for the brand to stand out from competitors and be NYT’s T Brand Studio offered high-quality production that would help the bank break the traditional banking creative of stock imagery, boardrooms and business people.

Using NYT audience consumption-behavior data, we could see how the NYT audiences were changing the way they engaged with new content. They were participating much more in interactive ways such as swiping, selecting etc. We used this to determine the optimum content format that would consciously engage readers, while educating them through the storytelling process.

We designed an interactive journey using original copy and stylish animated illustrations to help readers personalise the outcome and determine their core values based on the five core topics.

The journey was constructed to engage readers on the three pillars of Sustainable Investing:

1. Inclusion: what would they add to their portfolio?
2. Exclusion: what would they remove that doesn’t align to their values?
3. Impact: what funds resonated most that would create impact? – similar to philanthropy, but with a return.

At the end, the reader was presented with a personalised and weighted portfolio based on what appeared to be most important to them, along with a little fact or statistic relevant to that result.

If the reader decided that they wanted to dive deeper into this result they could “Explore more” and be directed to 1 of 5 custom New York Timesian article on UBS.com specifically linked to their portfolio result.

To reduce disruption in this transition from publisher to bank, the article also featured its own illustrations with the same aesthetic style to smooth out the reader journey.

The approach outperformed NYT and UBS benchmarks and drove real business results. Based on the success of the campaign mid-way through – UBS decided to localize the concept in the strongest and weakest markets (DE, SG, HK) using local publications . These partnerships are still running and already showing promising results.

• 744k page
• Average dwell time: 01:23 mins, plus additional 01:34 mins avg. dwell achieved on ‘Explore more’ result articles published on com.
• 38,466 quiz
• 19,277 clicks to UBS.com
• 82 ‘Contact us’ forms started on UBS.com, 40 completed (x30 question form). If one of these leads invested with UBS the partnership will have paid for itself multiple times
• 235 million NYT ad unit
• 69% of readers said they felt that UBS was an expert on Sustainable Investing .
• 60% of readers said they’d be likely to contact UBS following exposure to the content .

COUNTRIES COVERED

U.K., Germany, Switzerland, U.S., Hong Kong and Singapore www.nytimes.com/ubs

Client Quote:
“Rather than just telling a story, this program has engaged our audience on a deep and personalized level. Sustainable investing is fundamental to UBS and we’re very excited to see that tens of thousands of people chose to go through the quiz, all the way to the end” – Dr. Winfried Daun, Managing Director, Group Head Advertising, Brand Strategy & Media, UBS

The Italian jewelry brand Pomellato partnered with T Brand Studio, the branded content team at The New York
Times, seeking to raise awareness of the Pomellato brand and create content to support its 2018
#PomellatoForWomen campaign to launch on International Women’s Day. In particular, the challenge was to raise
awareness of the brand among a younger, female audience and to provide context and setting for Pomellato’s new
brand video featuring influential women like Jane Fonda, Anjelica Huston, Chiara Ferragni and other inspiring figures who are publicly spreading the word about the importance of female empowerment.

T Brand Studio’s strategy was to align the brand with the larger conversation about women’s rights primarily through news coverage of key events throughout history to today’s #MeToo movement — a strategy that allowed to further align the two brands in a truly native environment. For this, we used the occasion of International Women’s Day to launch digital branded content marking milestones in women’s rights from 1967, when the house of Pomellato was born, to the present day.

Positioning Pomellato in line with key historic moments in the women’s movement provided the brand with a new
platform to show the many ways it has consistently been focused on women’s role in society, reflecting a strong,
independent and expressive femininity.

It was a natural alignment, given that The New York Times broke the Harvey Weinstein sexual assault story and later
won a Pulitzer Prize for the investigative journalism that prompted a worldwide movement. This topic further
allowed Pomellato’s empowerment message to resonate with audiences in an authentic, contextually aligned and
impactful way.

With a tight production schedule of around three weeks, T Brand Studio’s editors, designers and developers worked
closely together to develop a timeline approach for the campaign message page layout, resulting in a dynamic,
interactive page that’s informative, both historic and modern, and a thoroughly topical read for The New York
Times’s audience.

T Brand Studio created a timely and engaging Paid Post marking key milestones throughout the women’s rights
movement that lives on nytimes.com. The post also housed the brand’s video, featuring interviews with powerful
women including Jane Fonda, Anjelica Huston and Chiara Ferragni, among others. In addition, there were two
supporting social posts that helped put Pomellato at the heart of the women’s rights conversation.

This highly successful campaign achieved all the primary and secondary KPIs that Pomellato aimed for. By obtaining
137 million impressions in total and overdelivering on page views by 42 percent, we fulfilled the main objective of
this partnership, which was to raise awareness of Pomellato globally. Also, with high click-through rates that
exceeded both The New York Times’s and T Brand Studio’s benchmarks, we were able to truly engage our target
audience and deliver an informative, timely and fascinating Paid Post.

Below is a summary of the key results from this campaign:

135M total impressions — Only 4M impressions were contracted in the media plan

Over delivered on page views by 42%

74.8% scroll rate — 7% higher than the industry benchmark*

54.1% video completion rate — 16% higher than T Brand Studio’s benchmark

Display CTR 63% higher than New York Times benchmark

Social CTR twice as high as T Brand Studio’s benchmark

*Industry benchmarks by MOAT

Korean Air is the largest commercial airline in South Korea, servicing more than 120 destinations internationally. The aviation sector in the Asia-Pacific is highly competitive and one of the world’s biggest markets. In the region, Korean Air’s competitors include Singapore Airlines, Cathay Pacific and Japan Airlines, making it crucial for Korean Air to increase market cut-through and brand awareness. The goal for the branded content (within which sits the video) was 60,000 page views.

In the lead up to the Winter Olympics, Korean Air wanted to create a branded content campaign that aligns with
newsroom coverage. Even though Korean Air was a sponsor of the Winter Olympics, other legal and rights
complications surrounding the athletes and the event itself meant we weren’t allowed to feature  prominent/professional athletes or mention the Olympic Games. This was a significant challenge given that Olympic
alignment was a primary objective for the client. We eventually identified a young speed skater who had broken the
national record the previous year but was too young to qualify for the Olympics.

We also had to work under a tight timeline of five weeks. In this period of time, we identified the subject,
coordinated and conducted the film shoot and finished editing the film (with translated subtitles). As the subject
doesn’t speak English, we had to engage a translator and a fixer to smooth the language barrier.

Reaching The New York Times’s global readership of more than 150 million unique readers requires a deep
understanding of user behavior within The NYTimes digital ecosystem. We leveraged an internal proprietary tool
called Readerscope to ascertain the type and form of content that would resonate among our target audience. We
decided that a subject-driven profile with a clear, simple but impactful story tended to perform better and that a
short video would probably be the best mechanism to deliver the story in a clear way. Additionally, based on our
understanding of our readers’ behavior on site, we were able to drive the branded content specifically to NYTimes
readers who are international travelers, our client’s most relevant target sector.

New York Times readers also expect their consumption branded content from T Brand Studio to be a seamless
experience as they read newsroom articles. As such, we only included very subtle brand mentions of Korean Air and
approached the content from a journalistic perspective.

To overcome legal and licensing obstacles, we knew that we couldn’t profile a professional athlete, so our strategy
was to craft a compelling story around a young non-sponsored athlete who’s credible at a winter sport.

Video performance was outstanding, outperforming all benchmarks and achieving some of the highest completion
rates seen at T Brand Studio. An extra 7,250 views were delivered via CPV as added value. Social media CTR was
above benchmark on both Twitter and Facebook. Across all activity, over 90 million impressions were served. Here
are some key figures:

76,444 — total page views
61.06% — total video completion rate (+30% vs. benchmark)
19.09 % — video start rate (+169% vs. benchmark)
1:47 — total session time on desktop
89, 331,799 — total onsite impressions on NYTimes