This week, The New York Times is celebrating the 175 anniversary of its founding on September 18, 1851. To commemorate the foremost milestone, the publication is paying tribute to one of many establishments that’s saved its journalism working for nearly two centuries: advertisers.
The marketing campaign’s centerpiece is a nine-page print unfold that includes seven actual adverts from The New York Instances’s huge archives, relationship all the way in which again to its inaugural 12 months. It additionally consists of a landing page on the NYT’s Promoting homepage with a timeline of the important thing moments, digital adverts throughout the publication’s varied verticals, and audio spots on its podcasts.
It arrives at a difficult time for publishers, who, within the period of zero-click search and declining print ads, are reevaluating their enterprise fashions. In its earnings report for the second quarter of 2026, the NYT acknowledged that its print promoting revenues decreased 11.1% whereas its digital promoting revenues rose 20.7% in comparison with the second quarter of 2025.
For the NYT, the marketing campaign serves as a key second to publicly acknowledge the contributions of its advertisers. Nevertheless it additionally displays an fascinating sample: every asset featured within the marketing campaign reveals how promoting is usually one step forward of the subsequent societal shift.
“What we discovered was, over time, promoting really mirrored the cultural moments that we have been reporting on,” says Tusar Barik, SVP of marketing for New York Instances Promoting.
7 adverts to outline The Instances
The concept for the commemorative marketing campaign began when Barik took his workforce on a tour of the NYT bodily archives, positioned three flooring underground in a constructing subsequent to the publication’s workplace. He says the room is full of “hundreds of thousands of pages of printouts.”
At first, he imagined a undertaking that might illustrate how extensively promoting codecs have modified—from the lengthy, tightly packed chunks of flowery textual content within the late 1800s to editorial images within the ‘60s and, immediately, digital property, video, and extra. However as he appeared extra intently on the adverts themselves, he discovered one thing much more fascinating: the social developments they augured.
In 1909, Ford took out an advert within the NYT to focus on its Mannequin T as “the $850 automotive that received the New York to Seattle race.” On the time, the auto trade was simply shifting from luxurious to mass manufacturing. In 1966, IBM purchased advert house to run a big image of the moon, selling its involvement in “serving to the NASA workforce put a person on the moon.” Three years later, that mission was full. And in 1994, Delta Air Lines used the NYT to proudly declare its plan to “develop into the one U.S. airline that flies completely smoke free,” serving to to spark a widening cultural dialog round banning smoking in public areas.
To create the ultimate marketing campaign property, Barik’s workforce chosen the very best examples of design and cultural relevance out of hundreds of potential choices, whereas additionally selecting corporations that also exist immediately—a tough feat, given what number of advertisers both not exist or have been subsumed into different corporations over time. All seven of the ultimate corporations (Tiffany & Co., Ford, Heinz, IBM, Delta, E*Commerce, and L’Oréal) gave their consent to be included within the undertaking, and none have been charged a price.
Barik hopes that the ultimate product will remind readers how “basically necessary” advertisers are for impartial journalism—and the way promoting itself is a type of historic documentation.
“We had this actually nice alternative to showcase, in all these totally different moments, how, no matter was taking place on this planet, advertisers have been additionally a part of that,” Barik says. “Similar to the information is telling the story of the world, promoting is telling a portion of that story.”
