The Truth Is Hard
THE NEW YORK TIMES · USAOSCARS · DROGA5
The first legacy-paper trust ad of the Trump era. The prelude to *Truth Is Worth It*.
February 2017. Weeks into the Trump presidency. The New York Times aired its first television commercial in a decade and bought premium inventory at the Academy Awards. Created by Droga5, the ad was black text on a white background. NYT Franklin set against the void. NYT Karnak underneath, slab-serif and immovable. No footage. No newsroom. No journalists. Just typography arguing with itself.
The audio was a cacophony of overlapping voices, each beginning The truth is… - the truth is our nation is more divided than ever, the truth is alternative facts are just a lie. The ad resolved with a single sequence: The truth is hard to find. The truth is hard to know. The truth is more important now than ever.
In the 24 hours after the broadcast, the Times signed up more subscribers than in the preceding six weeks. The first quarter of 2017 became the best subscription quarter in the paper’s history. The campaign generated 5.12 billion impressions and $16.8 million in earned media. The Truth Is Hard was the prelude that proved the formula. The Truth Is Worth It would follow in 2018, replacing typography with raw conflict-zone footage and turning the philosophical defense of fact into a concrete pitch about labour and cost.
The point was not the slogan. The point was the demonstration: civic anxiety, properly amplified, was the most effective subscriber-acquisition tool any newspaper had ever found.