Most anniversary campaigns look backward. The New York Times is using its 175th year to make the past feel useful in the present.
Its official announcement frames the anniversary through a different lens: not just what the newspaper published, but what brands chose to advertise alongside it. That turns the archive into a record of how products, technologies and consumer habits changed across generations.
Table of contents
Jump to each section:
- Why old ads still feel current
- What the 175-year campaign actually shows
- Why publisher brands are marketing their own archives
- What marketers should know about archive-led campaigns
Why old ads still feel current
Advertising archives work because they preserve ordinary ambitions in unusually specific detail. A jewelry ad from 1851, a Model T ad from 1909 or an IBM ad tied to the space race does more than show how brands once sold products. It shows what people wanted, feared, trusted or considered new at the time.
That is the cultural engine behind New York Times Advertising’s “175 Years of Advertising” campaign. The nine-page print spread selects seven ads from 1851 to 2026 and places each within the moment that made it meaningful.
The effect is closer to browsing a time capsule than reading a conventional advertiser pitch. Tiffany & Co. appears three months after the newspaper’s first issue. Ford turns a cross-country race into proof for the Model T. IBM connects its role in the space program to a period when computing was moving from abstraction into public imagination.
The common thread is not design style. It is context. Each ad becomes more interesting because the surrounding culture changed with it.
What the 175-year campaign actually shows
The campaign is built around a nine-page national print spread, but it does not stop there. New York Times Advertising is also using custom digital ad units, audio spots from global chief advertising officer Joy Robins and a dedicated digital timeline. Media is scheduled to run through September 30, 2026.
The selected advertisers include Tiffany & Co., Ford Motor Company, IBM, Heinz, E*TRADE, L’Oréal Groupe and Delta Air Lines. The mix lets the campaign move across several eras of consumption, from jewelry and automobiles to computing, finance, beauty and travel.
“Reviewing our expansive archive revealed a clear pattern: advertising often foreshadows significant cultural moments,” said Tusar Barik, SVP of marketing at New York Times Advertising. Those moments include shifts such as mass automobile adoption and the emergence of online banking.
That point matters because it changes what the archive is being asked to do. Instead of treating old advertising as decoration, the campaign uses it as evidence that commercial messages can become part of the historical record.
Why publisher brands are marketing their own archives
Publishers increasingly have to market two things at once: the editorial product people consume and the advertising environment brands are being asked to buy into.
That is why this campaign sits in an interesting category. It is consumer-facing nostalgia, but it is also a B2B argument about the value of appearing inside a trusted media environment for a long time.
The Times is not alone in making its own media brand part of the advertising story. The Economist’s 2026 “Know it before you need it” platform, for example, returned the publisher to live-action brand advertising across TV, radio, social, digital and out of home. Its pitch focused on trusted editorial judgement and the confidence that comes from understanding the world before a moment demands it.
The strategies are different, but the underlying job is similar. Both campaigns are trying to make an old media brand feel current without pretending its history does not matter.
For The Times, the archive is the creative system. For The Economist, the editorial promise becomes the creative system.
That distinction is useful for marketers because nostalgia campaigns often become weak when the past is treated as the entire idea. Here, history is being used to explain a present-day proposition: brands have long used media environments to signal relevance, credibility and participation in culture.
What marketers should know about archive-led campaigns
Archive-led marketing works best when the past helps explain something current. The New York Times campaign offers four useful signals for brand teams thinking about their own history.
- Start with evidence, not anniversary language.A milestone number is rarely enough to carry a campaign. The stronger material is usually the proof underneath it: old products, campaigns, customer habits, packaging, media placements or moments that show how the brand moved with its audience.
- Give every artifact context.An old ad is more valuable when people understand why it mattered at the time. The Times does this by pairing each selected advertisement with the cultural or technological shift around it. Context turns an archive item from memorabilia into a story.
- Use the archive across formats.The print spread is only one layer. Digital units, audio and the online timeline let the same historical idea work differently across channels without forcing every format to repeat the exact same creative.
- Connect heritage to a present commercial argument.The campaign ultimately links 175 years of advertising to a current message about advertiser relationships and the role advertising plays in supporting journalism. That gives the history a job beyond celebration.
The broader lesson is that heritage becomes more useful when it behaves like evidence rather than decoration. A brand archive can show how tastes changed, how categories formed and how products entered everyday life.
That makes archive-led campaigns less about saying “we have been here for a long time” and more about showing what the brand witnessed, enabled or learned while it was here.
