General Electric Buys The New York Times
General Electric buys The New York Times, but just for one day.
Something extraordinary happened when two well-known and very successful brands came together to make a public announcement.
General Electric bought all of the advertising space in a single weekday edition of The New York Times with an audience of 330,000 print subscribers to announce its plan to split into three publicly-traded companies.
It was historic. It was the first time in the paper’s 171-year history that any advertiser took over all of the available advertising spaces within the printed pages of The New York Times, making it the exclusive advertiser for December 6, 2022.
From a media strategy standpoint, if you can create focus, you can talk about focus.
This seven-figure campaign included digital advertising and a total of 22 full-page color print ads and interactive print ads, such as making a paper airplane and a circular crossword puzzle.
Why do this? Why use print?
This isn’t just advertising. The content has to be fantastic. It has to be just as interesting as the story on the page before it.
“From a media strategy standpoint, if you can create focus, you can talk about focus,” said Laura Correnti, a partner at Giant Spoon, GE’s media agency of record, as interviewed by Sara Fischer, author of Axios Media Trends. “For us this was really about singling GE out as the only message throughout the NYT ecosystem on this day.” General Electric’s marketing chief, Linda Boff, cited the quality of The New York Times‘ audience, as well as its reputation for quality storytelling, as the reason General Electric chose to partner with The New York Times. “This isn’t just advertising. The content has to be fantastic,” Boff said. “It has to be just as interesting as the story on the page before it.”
By closely associating General Electric’s content with the style and quality of content Times readers expect from their newspaper in all its media channels, including print, General Electric engages that audience in an impactful way. It is a useful model, not only for big organizations like General Electric and The New York Times, but for any organization with a well-known and well-cultivated audience.
Photo: Katie Wiggin / The New York Times. NYT with a GE branded wrapper on press in College Point, Queens.
