Conventional wisdom has it that Times Square is a playground of the big brand. Given the foot traffic on a typical day, it’s no wonder that companies like Coca-Cola, Pepsi, Heineken, and Virgin vie for supremacy on the billboards and jumbotrons above Broadway.
Imagine our surprise, then, when two purposeful organizations landed microdocs in Times Square in the past three months. The first was one of our clients, Plum Organics. This year Plum created a new social impact program, The Full Effect, to help address childhood food insecurity in America. In launching the program, Plum formed a partnership with the documentary film A Place at the Table to bring more awareness to the issue of childhood hunger. NASDAQ, the company behind the NASDAQ Stock Market, learned about Plum’s work and offered up their platform to aid in further awareness of this issue. Specifically, they asked Neil Grimmer, Plum’s CEO and co-founder of The Full Effect, to ring the opening bell. With that opportunity came the showcase of a 30-second short on the big screen in Times Square, which we cut specially for them and which ran on a loop for a few hours during the opening bell celebration.
Around the same time period, the nonprofit Grand Canyon Trust placed a 15-second video on the CBS jumbotron in Times Square. This one stayed up for several weeks. I reached out to the folks at Grand Canyon Trust and learned that this opportunity came about when one of CBS’s advertisers failed to get materials ready in time. CBS offered the Trust a slot at a highly discounted rate because it was a nonprofit and because of the last-second nature of the offer. Grand Canyon Trust jumped at the opportunity.