Brand storytelling that shifts perception — and proves it.

How a partnership with The New York Times delivered double-digit lifts in brand perception and unaided awareness by taking an honest look at what it meant to run a business in 2021.

February 2021. A year into the pandemic. An inbox full of resilience messaging, optimism campaigns, and "we're in this together" brand content. The challenge wasn't just to tell stories about small business owners — it was to tell them in a way that actually broke through.

As part of Square's brand campaign The Shape of Things to Come, we partnered with The New York Times to produce an interactive digital experience and a print spread in the Sunday Times. The work showed what the future looked like through the eyes of real small business owners — not idealized, not sanitized.

THE CHALLENGE: Brand campaigns are easy to produce and hard to measure. The standard metrics — impressions, reach, brand lift surveys — often tell you something happened without telling you what it meant. We needed to demonstrate that values-driven storytelling could move specific perception metrics, not just generate awareness.

We also needed to earn the right to tell these stories. In a media moment saturated with brand empathy, the work had to feel like journalism, not marketing dressed up as journalism.

THE APPROACH: We cast a diverse group of small business owners and commissioned original research and in-depth interviews. The resulting data and stories were shaped into a manifesto — positioning Square as an empathetic partner for entrepreneurs navigating what came next, not just what had just passed.

Publishing in the Sunday Times — both in print and as an interactive digital experience — meant the work lived in an editorial environment that lent it credibility. The New York Times partnership wasn't just a distribution play. It was a signal about where Square belonged in the cultural conversation.

THE RESULTS: