'The Atlantic' Brand Agency Creates COVID-19 Hub, Magazine Records Traffic Spike


The Atlantic’s brand agency, Atlantic 57, has created a destination for articles written by staff and contributors on how COVID-19 impacts brands.

The new platform, called “Altered,” will serve as a resource for Atlantic 57 clients, CMOs and brand partners to explore COVID-19’s impact on brands.

Altered launches with four articles written by Atlantic 57’s team. It will expand to include a weekly newsletter and workshops to help organizations navigate their own response to the pandemic.

Of the published pieces, one from senior strategy manager Rob Peckerman discusses how brands need to completely rethink building trust with their audiences. Strategy director Julie Dixon writes about lessons that can be learned from the way theaters, museums and other cultural institutions have responded to crises.

Atlantic 57 president Kate Watts wrote in a note on the Altered site: “As a firm dedicated to brand evolution and endurance, we wanted to explore how brands can navigate not just the current moment, but also the fundamentally altered world that awaits when we emerge from it.”

Over at The Atlantic, editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg announced to staff in an email that last month marked the most digital traffic the site has ever received, as well as a surge in digital subscribers.

According to Goldberg’s email, obtained by Nieman Lab, The Atlantic had more than 36,000 new subscribers in March, “even as we have lifted paywall restrictions on our coronavirus coverage.”

About one-third of those new subscribers include both digital and print; the rest were digital subscriptions, according to Nieman Lab.

The Atlantic had 87 million unique visitors to the site in March, and more than 168 million pageviews. 

That’s more than double the previous one-month record. 

The Atlanticrelaunched its metered paywall last September.

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