This Sunday, the New York Times will spend as much as $2.5 million to sell their newfound commitment to investigative journalism to Oscar audiences.
The paper, which has experienced such a steep decline in revenue that it moved out of several floors of its NYC office space to make room for renters, says it’s launching a “multi-faceted ad campaign” centered around its “pursuit of the Truth” in the age of President Donald Trump.
The campaign comes at a time when Times editors have routinely been characterizing Trump’s statements as “lies” and “falsehoods” in the Times‘ coverage of his administration.
The new “truth” ad campaign is the first brand campaign that the Times has launched in more than a decade.
The Times will kick off the campaign with a 30-second ad during the Academy Awards. They released a preview of the commercial on YouTube Thursday morning.
The ad cycles through a series of voices and tag lines meant to draw correlations to current events.
“The truth is our nation is more divided than ever,” one voice reads as the words hover on the screen in the Times‘s signature font. “The Truth is alternative facts are lies,” another voice responds. “The truth is his refugee policy is a backdoor Muslim ban,” another speaker offers.
The ad finishes with, “The truth is hard; the truth is hard to find; the truth is hard to know; and The truth is more important now than ever,” before flashing the New York Times logo and website.
The campaign, the Times‘ brand management department says, is designed to build “brand awareness” and stress the important role journalism plays and “why it matters.”
Viewers nationwide will see the ad during the Oscars ceremony on Sunday night, and lucky residents of New York, Los Angeles, Washington. DC., Chicago and several other large markets will also be subjected to a full-scale sales effort, including billboards and digital ads.
It’s clear newspapers like the Times and the Washington Post believe that the Trump era will be a saving grace for print journalism, as both newspapers have been touting their efforts to investigate the President since his Inauguration. The Washington Post even changed their tagline, earlier this week, to read “Democracy Dies in Darkness” (they swear it wasn’t inspired by Trump himself, however).
So far, the strategy has worked a bit – at least for the Times. In the final quarter of 2016, following Trump’s election, the Times added 275,000 digital subscribers and around 15,000 print subscribers, growing the company by more than 2%. It’s promising, but doesn’t come close to offsetting the drastic drop off in print advertising that’s become an existential threat to the Times‘ future.