THE RIGHT QUESTION
THE NEW YORKER
The New Yorker has an unofficial motto: “We don’t go to print when we’re out of time. We go to print when we’re out of questions.” It’s this relentless wielding of questions that makes their writing unique. They keep drilling down, asking question after question, long after others put the pen down and go to print. Eventually, they get to a question that brings new light and deeper understanding to even the most familiar subject. A question that changes everything. To mark The New Yorker’s ninety-fifth anniversary, we created a campaign that celebrated these questions, and the articles they lead to.
Launch CREATIVE
We plumbed the archive for stories that exemplify the theme of the campaign: how the right question can change everything, and that expand people’s perception of the magazine’s subject matter. It’s not all ballet and politics!
SOCIAL FILMS
We then worked with Make Productions to parallax-animate our images into short six-second social films. Here they all are back-to-back:
30 SECOND FILMS
As part of the campaign we created two 30s films that brought two iconic New Yorker articles to life. The first was Ronan Farrow’s Pulitzer Prize winning reporting that brought down Harvey Weinstein, and the second was a personal essay from Jia Tolentino about growing up in a Houston mega-church and finding a different type of spiritual connection through drugs and Hip Hop.
Ronan Farrow, “From Aggressive Overtures to Sexual Assault: Harvey Weinstein’s Accusers Tell Their Stories,” October 2017
Jia Tolentino, “Losing Religion and Finding Ecstacy in Houston,” May 2019
AWARDS
DIGIDAY - Best Branding Campaign B2C