A newspaper celebrating its own birthday is a modest enough affair, but when The New York Times turns 175, it finds a way to make the occasion about someone else — or at least to appear to.
Starting Wednesday, New York Times Advertising is running a multi-page print spread collecting seven advertisements from the paper's archives, dating to 1851, when the first issue rolled off the presses and into a city that had not yet heard of Abraham Lincoln. The selections — from Tiffany & Company, Ford, Heinz, IBM, Delta, E*Trade and L'Oréal — were chosen for their cultural resonance and their advertisers' long relationships with the paper, according to Tusar Barik, senior vice president of marketing at The Times. None of the brands paid for inclusion.
(One imagines the meeting where that decision was made.)
The earliest entry, a Tiffany advertisement from the paper's founding year, consists entirely of a dense block of text with no imagery whatsoever — a reminder that advertising, like so much else, has grown more visual as attention has grown more scarce. A 1909 Ford campaign promoted the $850 Roadster; a 1994 Delta spot celebrated the airline's first nonsmoking commercial flight, a milestone that now seems as distant as the Roadster itself.
"This is a moment for us to reflect on what independent journalism means to society," said Joy Robins, the paper's chief revenue officer. "Advertisers and brands who are investing in news organizations and fact-based journalism deserve a lot of credit."
The campaign will extend to digital placements through Sept. 30, audio spots featuring Ms. Robins's voice, and distribution across The Times's portfolio, including The Athletic and Cooking. The print spread concludes with a letter from Ms. Robins thanking advertisers for their support.
The effort arrives, of course, at a moment when print's relevance has diminished considerably from the days when a single Times advertisement could introduce a nation to a new automobile. Still, Ms. Robins argued that the format retains distinct value. "There is something about the print activation that is almost akin to outdoor," she said.
David Coker, a co-founder of the print advertising startup Spacely Media, offered a more pointed defense. "The world is going to run out of people who know how to buy print," he said, "long before it runs out of people reading print media."
That may be true. But it is also the sort of thing people say at anniversary parties, when the occasion calls for optimism and the champagne is already open.
Original story published in Adweek: "New York Times Marks 175 Years With a Print Love Letter to Advertising"