Social Rocket
The New York Times is turning its own advertising archive into a campaign. To mark 175 years since its founding, New York Times Advertising launches "175 Years of Advertising": a nine-page print spread showing seven historic ads from the years 1851 to 2026. The campaign has been running since September 18 and will be extended until September 30 through digital ads, a dedicated landing page and audio spots in New York Times podcasts.
The campaign was reported by ADWEEK. An accompanying company statement explicitly describes the selection as a look back at advertising moments tied to social and cultural change.
Seven ads as a timeline
The series opens with a Tiffany ad from 1851, the year the newspaper was founded. Other examples come from Ford in 1909 and IBM in 1966, among others. The selection is supplemented by pieces from Heinz, E*TRADE, L'Oréal Groupe and Delta Air Lines.
According to ADWEEK, the participating brands did not pay to be included in the anniversary spread. Instead, cultural relevance, recognisability and, in some cases, long-standing relationships with the publisher were decisive.
In this way, the campaign itself becomes a kind of product demonstration: the New York Times is not only selling current reach and ad placements, but showing through its archive how long advertising has already been part of its journalistic product and its funding.
Print here is a symbolic showcase, not a growth story
The timing is interesting. The New York Times' advertising business is currently growing mainly digitally. According to the company's Q2 report filed with the US Securities and Exchange Commission, digital advertising revenue rose by 2026 percent year on year in the second quarter of 20,7 to around 114 million US dollars. Print advertising revenue, by contrast, fell by 11,1 percent to around 35,2 million US dollars. Overall, advertising revenue grew by 11,3 percent.
The anniversary campaign is therefore not evidence of a comeback for print as a growth channel. Rather, print takes on the role of a historical stage, while the actual extension of the campaign runs across digital spaces and audio.
For publishers, this separation matters. While Reuters has meanwhile begun dynamically optimising its paywall between subscription and advertising value, many media houses are at the same time struggling with declining search referrals. Some are therefore buying significantly more paid search traffic. Others are building more specialised paid products, as most recently POLITICO with its new tech policy offering Decoded.
What marketers can take away
The campaign shows above all how an in-house archive can be used as a brand asset. Rather than simply building an anniversary logo, the New York Times makes its historic advertising itself the content. This creates a credible link to its own business history that other brands cannot simply copy.
The channel architecture is just as striking. The large print spread is the attention-grabbing centrepiece, but it is not run in isolation. Digital ads, a dedicated web space and podcast audio extend the same idea into channels that today carry a larger share of usage and marketing.
For brands with extensive archives, this can be a more meaningful anniversary model than pure nostalgia: select historical assets, place them in a current context, and build a cross-media format from them. What matters is that the archive actually tells something about the brand or its industry – and isn't just old.