How 'The NY Times' Won Athena Grand Prize

By: Lucia Moses Faced with the challenge of building readership after the Sept. 11 attacks last year, Alyse Myers, vice president of marketing services for The New York Times, decided it was an occasion for "moment marketing."

The Times' answer was a brief and understated in-paper campaign that adapted Norman Rockwell paintings to the post-attack environment. For the series, the Times' longtime agency, Bozell New York, last week captured this year's $100,000 Athena Award program grand prize for creativity in newspaper ads. This marked the first time a newspaper was the subject of a grand prize since the Athenas were revived in 1998.

The Times bought licensing rights from the Rockwell estate for an undisclosed amount to alter and use his paintings. Designed to show the newspaper's value in explaining world events, the five resulting ads carried the tagline "Make sense of our times" and employed the somber tone used by many marketers anxious to avoid appearing to exploit the attacks. But the alterations -- such as placing a map of Afghanistan in a vintage classroom setting -- were also exceedingly clever.

Bozell Senior Partner Justin Harrington, who manages the Times account, knew the stakes were big. "I said: 'We can do nothing or do something great.'" The Rockwell concept prevailed over other ideas because it "had a tendency to uplift people," he explained. "It said, 'We've been through this before.'"

The Athena Award-winning ads were announced Wednesday by the Newspaper Association of America and its affiliated Newspaper National Network.