Building on its ongoing (and award-winning) ‘Truth’ marketing platform, The New York Times leveraged spiking interest in tennis in its home city around the 2019 US open by launching a campaign which shines a spotlight on the gender gap in sports
Launched to coincide with the US Open semi-finals on 6 September, this campaign seeks to highlight the pay inequality and the struggles of female professional athletes and it also aims to underscoring the campaigning quality of its own journalism around the issue.
The latest campaign, developed in alliance with creative agency Droga5, uses the media organisation’s now familiar blend of black and white text interspersed with audio pulled from real life, the film features key phrases from NYT’s past coverage: “Girl-cott,” “No Backing Down, “Cry for Equality,” all set to sounds of a tennis match. It culminates with the headline from reporter Maya Salem’s 2019 story, “The Long Fight for Pay Equality in Sports.”
The TV ad debuted on-air and across the media organisation’s social channels during the US Open semi-finals on 6 September.
The campaign was created for the New York Times by a team at agency Droga5-New York.
Comment:
This campaign echoes the USTA’s own 2019 US Open ‘Women Worth Watching’ campaign (see case study).
Indeed, both campaigns draw on synergies between their campaigns that the fact that the US Open was the tournament fulcrum around which Billie Jean King championed and campaigned for gender pay parity ever since 1973 – the year that she threatened to sit out the tournament unless its male and female champs were paid equally.
Since then, the tournament has offered gender pay equality.
The spot also reinforced the newspaper’s own commitment to covering gender inequity – especially in sports (in 2017, the paper appointed Jessica Bennett its first Gender editor).
The paper’s ongoing ‘Truth Has A Voice’ campaign began in 2017
and has continued since it launch with various thematic focuses on the issue of ‘the Truth’ with, for example, ads debuted during the Golden Globes Award and aired amidst the height of the Harvey Weinstein scandal,
on Trump’s financial background,
on the paper’s reporting on NFL concussions (ahead of the Super Bowl).
Links:
New York Times
https://www.youtube.com/user/TheNewYorkTimes
https://www.instagram.com/nytimes/
https://www.facebook.com/nytimes
Droga5
Leave a comment
You must be logged in to post a comment.