BBDO New York

Client: The New Yorker
Product: The New Yorker
Title: New Yorker Caption Contest
Media: Instagram
Country: USA
Date Of Campaign: 12/9/2019

Background: The New Yorker’s weekly Caption Contest has become a highlight for readers over the years. But with the New Yorker’s readership rapidly aging, they needed to reach a younger audience.

Idea: To recruit a new generation of readers, we turned to the platform where young people flex their caption writing every day – Instagram Stories. Here, people show off their sharp wit by writing funny captions on their videos and photos. So, we turned The New Yorker’s Caption Contest into a weekly social contest on Instagram. Every week, we share the un-captioned cartoons through the New Yorker Instagram account. People are prompted to copy the cartoon into their own story, add their super-clever caption, and share it. With every share we opened up a whole new audience, and a whole new group of people desperate to one-up their friends with a wittier caption.

Results: At the end of the first competition we raised the submission by 10% and created 1.86 mm organic social impression, with a $0 media budget. In fact, the social Caption Contest proved so popular that The New Yorker have decided to turn this promotion into an ongoing program.