Don’t count out the banner ad just yet. The New York Times has rolled out another creative showstopper.
There’s a Prudential interactive unit on the NYT homepage right now that lets readers enter their birth date to see the front cover of the Gray Lady from that day. The 970 x 250 unit taps into the NYT archive of about 55,000 front pages over the last century. There’s a social component to the ad that lets readers share their front page news on Twitter and LinkedIn. The campaign will run today only.
It’s a prime example of data-mining tactics used for advertising creativity. This is the first time the Times has done something as large as this unit using a database. The company created a directory with more than 110,000 thumbnails of its front page from 1863 to 2002. Prudential created this in collaboration with NYT Idea Lab and third party ad vendor Pointroll. The unit is dubbed “DoubleBill.”
Here’s what the takeover looks like before a user enters their birthday.
Here’s what the ad looks like after the birthday is entered. I used my special day — August 8, 1978.
More in Media
How a German publisher JV is turning LLM visibility into a premium brand buy
Germany’s BCN, the joint-venture commercial arm of three major publishing houses – Hubert Burda Media, Funke and Klambt – is rolling out a commercial product that helps brands get properly surfaced and described inside ChatGPT, Gemini and other AI assistants, not just on traditional search results pages.
AI podcast experiments march on with Forbes’ new daily audio briefing
Forbes bets on AI-generated audio with a five-minute daily news brief. Stories are selected by product, editorial and an internal AI tool.
How USA Today Co. is trying to beat AI Overviews on World Cup news
USA Today Co. is using AI tools to beat AI Overviews in the race for World Cup search traffic around breaking news.