Village Voice is an editorial channel that has heritage of capturing the real, uncensored voice of New York. Our challenge was prove this brand position, and at the same time, re-establish the Village Voice as the go-to source of arts and culture.

Our strategy was to create a campaign that would not just advertise the Village Voice, but would give New Yorkers a new way to get involved in the creation of cultural content with the brand. And so we created ‘New York Writes Itself’, a crowd sourced content platform designed as a simple destination for New Yorkers to write down the amazing things they see and hear on the streets of NY everyday, which Village Voice can feature as editorial and creative content.

New York Writes Itself was launched as an invite for New Yorkers to write down the great moments they experience on the streets to be featured as Village Voice content - Launch involved a citywide outdoor campaign including street posters, digital and printed billboards, social media, Village Voice media including online and print, and VillageVoice.com.

This drove people to newyorkwritesitself.com, the hub of the consumer generated writing and content.

Key cultural influencers and bloggers spread news of the platform in relevant sub-cultures and the creative community.

The next step was to re-create the writing in a way that would strike a chord with the arts and culture community – We collaborated with the city’s best letterpress artists to re-create selections of the writing as 500 limited edition prints. New York Writes Itself is now a permanent piece of Village Voice arts and culture content, with future content in production for 2012.

‘- New York Writes Itself’ has been so successful as a new cultural platform that Village voice have made it a permanent piece of their arts and culture content: With an Off-Broadways play and comedy series currently in production, all fuelled by the real stories submitted at NewYorkWritesItself.com-24 million media impressions to date-2 million unique visits to the website to date -Held at the Art Directors Club in NY, the exhibition achieved a record attendance-52 articles of earned media in editorial channels outside the Village Voice including New York Times and CBS News.

- $15,000 revenue generated in sold artwork that goes 100% to the artists involved.