Shortlisted 2019
Lifestyle, Luxury and Fashion
Brand
Pomellato
Entered by:
T Brand Studio, The New York Times
Credits:
Pomellato: Looking Back, Striding Forward
The Challenge
The Italian jewelry brand Pomellato partnered with T Brand Studio, the branded content team at The New York
Times, seeking to raise awareness of the Pomellato brand and create content to support its 2018
#PomellatoForWomen campaign to launch on International Women’s Day. In particular, the challenge was to raise
awareness of the brand among a younger, female audience and to provide context and setting for Pomellato’s new
brand video featuring influential women like Jane Fonda, Anjelica Huston, Chiara Ferragni and other inspiring figures who are publicly spreading the word about the importance of female empowerment.
The Strategy
T Brand Studio’s strategy was to align the brand with the larger conversation about women’s rights primarily through news coverage of key events throughout history to today’s #MeToo movement — a strategy that allowed to further align the two brands in a truly native environment. For this, we used the occasion of International Women’s Day to launch digital branded content marking milestones in women’s rights from 1967, when the house of Pomellato was born, to the present day.
Positioning Pomellato in line with key historic moments in the women’s movement provided the brand with a new
platform to show the many ways it has consistently been focused on women’s role in society, reflecting a strong,
independent and expressive femininity.
It was a natural alignment, given that The New York Times broke the Harvey Weinstein sexual assault story and later
won a Pulitzer Prize for the investigative journalism that prompted a worldwide movement. This topic further
allowed Pomellato’s empowerment message to resonate with audiences in an authentic, contextually aligned and
impactful way.
With a tight production schedule of around three weeks, T Brand Studio’s editors, designers and developers worked
closely together to develop a timeline approach for the campaign message page layout, resulting in a dynamic,
interactive page that’s informative, both historic and modern, and a thoroughly topical read for The New York
Times’s audience.
The Implementation
To achieve Pomellato’s goal of positioning the brand as an empowering one for women, The New York Times’s T
Brand Studio created a content destination on nytimes.com (https://www.nytimes.com/paidpost/pomellato/howwomen-are-paving-the-road-to-equality.html), using an engaging timeline format, examining key moments that defined the women’s rights movement from the early 20th century up to now and how these landmark civic changes are influencing our lives today. Along with this main narrative, we featured newsroom articles and images from The New York Times’s archives that added depth and lent broader background to each landmark moment.
The page’s functionality is optimized for all platforms; it scrolls horizontally on desktop and tablet, but shifts to a
vertical scroll when viewed on mobile to ensure engagement. The design and content were strategically positioned
throughout the page to optimize for performance.
The narrative included archival New York Times articles immortalizing key events, such as a piece about the adoption of the U.N. Declaration on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women in 1967. This was followed by other moments, including the monumental Roe v. Wade decision by the United States Supreme Court in 1973, ruling that women have a constitutional right to abortion. The final entry in the timeline covers the #MeToo movement, with a link to an accompanying newsroom archive article titled, “The #MeToo Movement: What’s Next?” which sheds light on how this global feminist issue has taken shape and where it is heading for future generations.
In light of The New York Times’s having broken the monumental Harvey Weinstein story and the birth of the
#MeToo movement, the addition of archival newsroom content and partnership with The New York Times proved to
be a groundbreaking and supremely timely move for the Italian brand in getting its message of female
empowerment across in an authentic, organic way.
The Result
T Brand Studio created a timely and engaging Paid Post marking key milestones throughout the women’s rights
movement that lives on nytimes.com. The post also housed the brand’s video, featuring interviews with powerful
women including Jane Fonda, Anjelica Huston and Chiara Ferragni, among others. In addition, there were two
supporting social posts that helped put Pomellato at the heart of the women’s rights conversation.
This highly successful campaign achieved all the primary and secondary KPIs that Pomellato aimed for. By obtaining
137 million impressions in total and overdelivering on page views by 42 percent, we fulfilled the main objective of
this partnership, which was to raise awareness of Pomellato globally. Also, with high click-through rates that
exceeded both The New York Times’s and T Brand Studio’s benchmarks, we were able to truly engage our target
audience and deliver an informative, timely and fascinating Paid Post.
Below is a summary of the key results from this campaign:
135M total impressions — Only 4M impressions were contracted in the media plan
Over delivered on page views by 42%
74.8% scroll rate — 7% higher than the industry benchmark*
54.1% video completion rate — 16% higher than T Brand Studio’s benchmark
Display CTR 63% higher than New York Times benchmark
Social CTR twice as high as T Brand Studio’s benchmark
*Industry benchmarks by MOAT