In September 2019 and into 2020, Brooklyn Brothers launched an ambitious campaign for the Financial Times. The New Agenda aimed to broaden the publication’s reach to appeal to a younger, more diverse audience, that saw the newspaper as “part of the establishment”. It called for a reset on capitalism. The campaign achieved the greatest level of earned coverage in the FT’s history and 1 million new subscribers. A big act to follow.
Undaunted, Brooklyn Brothers and the Financial Times have launched an even more provocative campaign this year, Letters to This New World, with the catchcry, “Everything is at stake”. At the heart of the campaign is a series of open letters by Financial Times journalists – including chief economics commentator, Martin Wolf, and business columnist, Pilita Clark – which address the most urgent issues, from climate change to cryptocurrencies, that will shape tomorrow. The campaign asks readers to change habits of a lifetime to rebuild the world the way it should be, rather than the way it is.
The letters will run across the FT’s own print and online editions, supported in digital, audio, cinema and out of home, across the UK, US, EMEA and APAC. Members of the public are invited in turn to submit their letters. The strongest will be published in the next phase of the campaign later in the year.
Promoting the letters is a 30-second commercial, The speech, a montage leaders urging change – including New Zealand prime minister, Jacinda Ardern; US vice-president, Kamala Harris; Pakistani activist, Malala Yousafzai; and UK chancellor, Rishi Sunak. The commercial will air the UK, US and Germany as well as online.
Finola McDonnell, chief communications and marketing officer at the FT, statedm “The pandemic has given everyone pause to reflect on what matters in life and how we could organise ourselves differently in future. “We wanted to capture some of those reflections and put them out there for business leaders and those in positions of power to think about and act upon. We are at an inflection point, and the FT is positioned to encourage and lead debate about what comes next.”
George Bryant, chief creative officer at The Brooklyn Brothers, added, “The global pandemic has wrought change and demanded evolution, economically and socially, on a scale that no-one could imagine. ‘Letters to this new world’ is a global platform for FT and its community of leaders to share ambitions and collectively write a new agenda.”
