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2020 ADC Awards - Interactive

Caption Contest

Agency BBDO / New York + The er / New York

Client The New Yorker
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Annual ID

ADC_INT20_033S

About the Work

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