Beginning this week, Wired will flood city streets and highways with its biggest brand marketing push in years.
A wall-size mural in Brooklyn, wheatpasted posters in Washington, D.C., New York, Los Angeles, and Austin, and nearly 20 digital billboards from the East Bay through San Francisco will promote its upcoming politics issue, whose cover is pictured below. Each placement carries a QR code driving passersby to a subscription page.
For global editorial director Katie Drummond, who joined the publisher in September 2023, the campaign represents more than marketing. It encapsulates her strategy of turning Wired’s journalists into recognizable figures across platforms—from billboards to TikTok—and using their credibility to power both audience growth and revenue.
“We want to flood the zone in a very physical way with this cover,” Drummond said. “The idea is to take all the amazing journalism we’ve done this year and make a moment out of it.”
The campaign signals a rare level of brand care in publishing, according to Code & Theory co-founder Dan Gardner.
“Publishers don’t do that enough,” Gardner said. “The fact that Wired cares about its brand is important. Choosing out of home is interesting too — it broadens visibility and breaks out of the generative news cycle, where everything feels like a commodity.”
The evolution is the latest in a series of transformations reshaping the news media industry. Reporters are increasingly adopting the techniques of influencers to disseminate their work more effectively across social platforms, as publishers themselves adopt vertical video, lo-fi video podcasts, and other hallmarks of social media content.
Journalists as influencers
When Drummond joined Wired, its videos were largely celebrity-driven or anonymous cut-downs, she said. Over the past year, the brand has hired six new video leads and rebuilt its approach to make reporters the faces of its coverage.
