Caption Contest
The New Yorker
Issue 54 | March 2020
Agency
BBDO New York
Creative Team
Chief Creative Officer, BBDO Worldwide: David Lubars Creative Vice Chairman, BBDO Worldwide: Greg Hahn Executive Creative Director: Tom Markham Creative Director: Damjan Pita
Production Team
Agency Producers Director of Integrated Production: David Rolfe Lead Developer: Alex Massicott Developer: Nick Russo QA Manager: Jimmy McGee Animator: Bo-Yoon Kim Jr. Interactive Producer: Katie Penna
Other Credits
Head of Innovation: Vishal Dheiman THE NEW YORKER Cartoon Editor: Emma Allen Associate Cartoon Editor: Colin Stokes Director of Social Media: Karen Taylor Quinn Senior Product Manager: Chelsea Farnham Software Engineers: Aaron Zick/Yongzhi Huan Composer: Hans Twite
Date
December 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, the idea was to turn 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, The New Yorker’s Caption Contest was turned into a weekly social contest on Instagram. Every week, the un-captioned cartoons were shared 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 a whole new audience was opened up, 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 the submission was raised by 10% and 1.86 mm organic social impression were created, 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