In 2021, GE announced its separation into three companies focused on the sectors of aerospace, energy, and healthcare. To celebrate this historic moment GE collaborated with New York Times Advertising: a cover-to-cover ad takeover of an entire edition of The New York Times newspaper, a first in The Times’s 171-year history. On December 6, 2022, readers were met with a total of 27 custom-designed ads revealing the impetus behind GE’s transformation, as well as takeovers in The Times’s audio and digital ecosystems. 

Centered on the theme of “focus,” the ads showcased GE’s business transformation while celebrating the employees whose focus helped develop key technologies. Inside, readers discovered interactive “focus breaks” dedicated to each new company. We worked with Guinness World Record-winner Ken Blackburn to create a paper airplane for GE Aerospace; Times puzzle-maker Brendan Emmet Quigley on a GE Vernova spiral crossword puzzle; and the creators of the patented Magic Eye 3D illusions on 3D medical imagery for GE HealthCare.

The takeover included 22 custom-designed full-page advertisements, plus five partial pages that ran across the print edition’s main news, business and arts & sciences sections. In addition, the campaign included takeovers across The Times’s ecosystem, including “The Daily,” newsletter briefings, and its opinion, business, science, and DealBook section fronts.

The groundbreaking campaign reinforced GE’s belief that focus is a superpower, and became one of the most significant marketing activations in the company’s history, outperforming Kantar B2B benchmarks overall by 239%, earning over 100 million press impressions, and a 57% average increase in brand familiarity for all three companies.