Cartier had three goals: (1) affirm its leadership in love; (2) reach a broader, more diverse audience beyond its core luxury consumer; and (3) spark renewed desire for the Trinity collection.

Based on the insight that the world is in desperate need of more love, our strategic solution aimed to triple the amount of love in The New York Times in celebration of Cartier’s Trinity’s 100th anniversary.

We proposed that Cartier surround the topic of love throughout the New York Times, ensuring the brand appears everywhere love does across print, online, and in audio throughout the year, and that we create a campaign of custom content featuring love stories to bring even more love into The Times’s ecosystem – thereby helping the brand with their key objectives: to reaffirm its leadership on love, attract new audiences, and spark desire for the Trinity collection.

Cartier’s legacy of love found the perfect partner in The New York Times, a brand with a rich history of exploring love through journalism. At the heart of this campaign was also a cultural moment for The New York Times as a publisher: the 25th anniversary of Modern Love — the iconic column about love and relationships that has since been turned into a book, a podcast and Amazon Prime TV series. This mutual anniversary year provided the ideal stage to bring Trinity’s centennial love story to the platform of NYT.

Linked by Love
Inspired by Trinity’s innovative design and conceptual timelessness, we wanted to honor the past 100 years and the truly uncountable number of love stories for which the ring has played a treasured role as a meaningful symbol of lifelong connection. Our idea was to scour the world to find 100 fascinating love stories, which we knew would only scratch the surface of the topic, to showcase love’s power to create emotional connection.

Our T Brand Studio editors and writers set out to find authentic stories from every continent, from husbands and wives, and newlyweds and widows, neighbors and friends, and parents and children. We gathered hundreds of stories in order to whittle down a curated list of romantic stories, heartbreaking stories, everyday love stories, new stories, and stories from decades ago. We explicitly looked for stories that would appeal to our audience, stories with interesting details, stories that avoided broad sentimentality or generic turns of phrase.

The end result: a 360° campaign that made Cartier synonymous with love throughout the year, sharing over 100 love stories to mark 100 years of the Trinity ring, and celebrate many more to come.

To reach their target audiences effectively, our content solution prioritized the following tactics and channels:

• Editorial Alignment: Aligning Cartier advertising with Modern Love to connect with engaged readers and listeners through stories of real, diverse expressions of love.
• Branded Content: Launching a massive 360 Custom Content series across print, digital, and audio to showcase loves many forms through Cartier’s lens
• Innovative Ad Formats: Utilizing high-impact placements across audio, digital, print, ensuring Cartier’s message of love reached every corner of The Times platform.
• Custom Ad Targeting Segment: Utilizing machine learning, we created a bespoke and proprietary first party targeting segment exclusively for this campaign, to ensure Cartier would reach any reader on any article in which a reader was likely to feel the emotion of love, whether or not the subject of love was explicitly mentioned.
• International Expansion: Bring love global by making The New York Times Sunday Magazine special Collaborative Issue with Modern Love the first issue of the magazine distributed internationally in the 129 year history of the magazine, and have the entire issue taken over by Cartier.

Through this integrated, multi-platform approach, Cartier and The New York Times created a powerful cultural moment – tripling love across channels, audiences, and experiences.

As an integrated 360° campaign, we aligned the Cartier brand in every corner of The New York Times wherever love was mentioned or discussed – and brought their collection to new audiences worldwide. In fact, with Cartier’s support we distributed The New York Times Magazine internationally outside the U.S. for the first time.

Our mission was clear: Make Cartier synonymous with love across The New York Times—publishing 100 stories to mark 100 years of the Trinity Ring. We brought these stories to life through a trinity of ad formats—print, audio, and digital—reaching audiences everywhere love lived.

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We printed 100 love stories on a 4-page cover wrap of The New York Times on the same day as the Modern Love special issue of The New York Times Sunday Magazine, in which Cartier took over every advertising page for us to present even more stories of love. The New York Times Sunday Magazine and Cartier’s takeover was printed and distributed internationally for the first time in the history of the magazine, a feat given it has been published since 1896.

On the Airwaves: We brought more love to the iconic Modern Love podcast, turning every :60 ad spot into a :60 love story. Real people shared personal love stories—in their own words—of romance, friendship, and self-love, weaving love into every episode.

In Every Corner of NYT Online: Cartier spread love across The Times’ digital ecosystem, infusing tiny love stories into the reader experience through in-feed placements and major ad canvases—targeting audiences across high-impact surfaces.

Love Takeover & Targeting: In a first-of-its-kind activation, Cartier launched the NYT Love Takeover, using The New York Times’ first-party data and AI modeling to target readers based on emotions—specifically, love. By analyzing audience behavior and predicting which articles would inspire feelings of love, we surfaced Cartier’s stories to those most likely to connect with them.

Our content delivered significant impact across all three of our core campaign objectives: driving reach, deepening engagement, and delivering measurable brand lift.

First, we achieved remarkable reach, cementing Cartier’s leadership in the space of love. The campaign generated over 117.6 million impressions and 385,800 clicks, with audiences spending the equivalent of 63 years engaging across platforms – an undeniable testament to Cartier’s brand dominance and cultural relevance.

Second, we aimed to drive deeper engagement across new geographies – and we delivered. Our innovative “100 Love Letters” native ad units achieved a 5% interaction rate overall, nearly six times higher than the Jewelry & Watches industry average. And what’s even more impressive is among active shoppers in-market for jewelry and gifts, engagement soared to over 10%, shattering industry benchmarks and driving meaningful audience participation.

Finally, our goal was to capture audience attention and drive measurable brand lift. According to Kantar’s brand study, the Trinity campaign delivered significant lifts throughout the funnel. Print advertising drove strong increases in brand awareness, familiarity, and purchase intent, while audio delivered impact across key metrics in the UK and France.

The audio campaign produced remarkable double-digit lifts, with Cartier brand familiarity rising by +14 percentage points and purchase intent increasing by +17 percentage points. Meanwhile, the high-impact visual storytelling across print and digital drove similarly impressive results—nearly +12 percentage points in brand familiarity and over +13 percentage points in purchase intent. Across every measure, Cartier’s results outperformed Kantar’s historical norms.

These results not only demonstrate the power of our content but also highlight our ability to drive attention, engagement, and meaningful impact for brands—proving that when creativity meets purpose, results follow.

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