Cannes Lions

Surround Yourself With The News

THE NEW YORK TIMES, New York / FACEBOOK / 2021

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Overview

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Credits

OVERVIEW

Background

Most people understand AR as something fun and frivolous, like using face filters with your phone camera to put bunny ears on your head. But Facebook believes that when we point our camera at the world around us, AR holds massive promise to change the way we explore, learn and interact; and from advanced research to Spark AR, their investments and advancements in Facebook Reality Labs reflect that.

So to help people see that future, The New York Times and Facebook established a multi-year collaboration to give the Times newsroom free rein to experiment and create AR journalism, powered by Facebook’s Spark AR technology.

The Times believes that immersive, highly visual journalism like AR can help people understand an increasingly complex world in a more personal way. This represents the first time The Times has made a concentrated effort in producing AR at this scale and off its own platform.

Idea

In its first year, The Times’s AR Lab successfully publishing AR journalism across Times properties, including News, Games, and Wirecutter. Those AR features — or "effects" — demonstrated the science of how masks work, visualized air pollution from the California wildfires, brought Wirecutter product recommendations to virtual life, and invented the Times’ first AR game with a 3D crossword puzzle.

Simultaneously The Times launched a marketing campaign called Surround yourself with the news that educates Times readers on AR’s value, guiding them to the AR effects on The Times’ Instagram. All creative is illustration-based, as not to compete with the AR journalism itself. The campaign continues to run across the Times’s rich ecosystem, from its broadest-reaching channels like The Daily and The Morning newsletter, while also enabling readers to launch and explore immersive journalism from the iconic Sunday Paper via QR code or directly from the news app.

Strategy

The expansive nature of our AR experimentation and widespread reader use of Instagram led us to strive to reach the broadest possible audience while they’re on their phones. To do this, we leveraged a mix of high-impact sponsorships alongside run-of-site mobile placements.

Our creative took a two-pronged approach — one set of “general” creative that touted Times AR journalism on Instagram at large, and one set of ever-changing “tailored” creative that highlights key AR effects as they roll out. Tailored creative executions have included explaining how N-95 Masks work, to debuting our first-ever AR Crossword Puzzle — generating awareness around the breadth of AR journalism while unearthing learnings on our audiences’ interests.

Execution

The campaign launched just ahead of Facebook’s Connect conference (AR/VR focus), where our collaboration made its debut in the keynote address. Our launch included high-impact takeovers across The Times’s farthest-reaching properties in digital, print, email, and audio such as our Homepage (mobile + app), The Daily, and The Morning newsletter.

Since then, we have sustained awareness across The Times with always-on “general” creative that drives users to the most recent effect on Instagram, and bursts to support “tailored” creative as new effects are published. Since our launch, we have generated 154.9M digital impressions and counting — in addition to 70M+ newsletter opens and 18M+ audio spot downloads.

Outcome

This collaboration and marketing campaign has created incredible impact - garnering 154.9M digital impressions, a +4% increase in brand favorability for Facebook, a +8% increase in perception of Facebook as a leader in AR, and a +7% increase in interest in rear-facing camera AR experiences. The campaign has also garnered press across the program launch (Times Insider, Axios, Engadget) and AR crossword effect launch (TechCrunch, AdWeek, The Verge). All of this has served to drive home the real value of AR to The Times’s millions of Instagram followers while providing unique brand equity and storytelling value for Facebook.

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