While there used to be innate suspicion toward Wikipedia among museum staffs, even hostility, in recent years there has increasingly been cooperation.
     |
The Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago has employed scratch-off advertising on bus shelters around the city to hype its newest exhibition, The Way of the Shovel: Art as Archaeology. The ads were printed on backlit, clear plastic. Scratching off the opaque topcoat reveals cool artwork underneath.
Since an ad campaign requiring real digging with actual shovels would have been prohibitively costly, difficult and unsafe, this is probably the best way to reinforce the theme of the exhibition. (A scratch-off tip-in ad was also placed in the Chicago Reader newspaper.) I could see this idea working well in film and theater advertising, too.
| |
Mrs. Miller, the last surviving child of Walt Disney, co-founded a museum dedicated to the memory of her father as a human being rather than a brand.
| |
Does talking to plants really help them grow? It's a question that, I'm sure, keeps us all awake at night. Luckily, Carmichael Lynch and the Denver Museum of Nature & Science have launched a social experiment (and marketing effort) called "Talk to a Plant," to probe this very issue.
One plant at the museum will "hear" tweets converted into human speech by an Arduino-based device. Another plant sits in silence nearby. Both are watered and tended to by staff. Which will grow stronger and healthier?
To take part in this odd experiment, just visit TalktoaPlant.com, log into your Twitter account and send the plant a message. Checking tweets via #talktoaplant, it seems that most folks, naturally enough, are sending their love and encouragement, bidding the green guy to grow big and strong.
Sending a note all the way from London, @ItsSeanBone gets into the spirit of things: "Plant, you're becoming famous. Make sure you keep yourself grounded." Heh. Plant humor. Not all the tweets are words of encouragement, though. "You deserve to die, plant," posts Parisian visitor @SylvainPaley. Sounds like someone needs a hug.
The campaign runs through Jan. 6, 2014, corresponding with "MythBusters: The Explosive Exhibition" at the museum, a tie-in with the long-running Discovery Channel science show.
On the site, there are constant updates on each plant's health and growth. Leaf peepers can even enjoy a 24/7 live plant-cam. (Oddly, there's no tie-in with Vine.)
It's definitely a fun, creative way to build traffic and engage new audiences with a topic as dry as natural science, though the setup seems a tad sadistic. The budding star gets all those tweets from well-wishers, while the other guy's trapped in a silent hell. C'mon, dude, grow—I'm rootin' for ya!
| |
The Dalian Wanda Group made a splash last year with its purchase of AMC Entertainment for $2.6 billion.
| |
The city of Toronto is offering prizes as part of its "What the Fact?" campaign promoting local museums and historic sites to young people. Unfortunately, those prizes are passes to the museums and sites in question, which should squash any interest among the target audience. Kidding, of course. But my snarky intro illustrates a very real problem facing the client: How do you market museums to a fickle audience that basically lives online?
Its answer is a campaign in 100 area bus shelters and online, headlined by the slogan "WTF?" in bold letters. The ads show historic artworks, soldiers' uniforms and other exhibits, and invite people to go to Facebook and guess what each item might be. Correct guesses get you free passes, which will be awarded once the campaign ends on Sept. 10, when the artifacts' identities will also be revealed.
"We wanted to find a way we could reach out to the general public and ideally a younger audience," museum services program designer Ilena Aldini-Messina tells the Toronto Star. "We find that social media is a great way to reach out to that audience."
Kudos for embracing interactivity, and for the quasi-questionable "WTF?" headline, which has predictably ruffled some feathers in the Great White North and generated free publicity for the cause. According to Inside Toronto, the campaign has already been shared or commented on 1,200 times—though I'm not convinced that will translate into more young people patronizing local museums and historic sites in the long run. The youthful target audience probably plans to sell the tickets to get cash for beer and earbuds.
| |
Up for a hot-dog bun full of worms? A pair of firecracker Speedos? How about a skewer through the nipple? You can get them all at Pittsburgh's Warhol Museum—in its summer 2013 ad campaign from MARC USA. The new work features traditional summertime imagery retooled to be more provocative, in keeping with much of the Warhol Museum's collection itself. (In fact, the ads are tame by comparison—which is just as well, since they need to get people in the door, not running from it.) "Summer's Different Here," says the copy on the vintage-postcard-style ads, which promote summer exhibitions spotlighting the work of three artists—musician and visual artist Genesis Breyer P-Orridge, photographer Caldwell Linker and sculptor/tattoo artist Nick Bubash. "In looking at what unites all these very different artists, we quickly understood that their works are meant to provoke and make you uncomfortable," says MARC USA creative director Josh Blasingame. "Our campaign built on that idea by looking at ordinary icons of summer and showing how they could be made more than a little uncomfortable." The campaign, running June through September, includes outdoor, print ads, digital banners and actual postcards. More images below.
CREDITS
Client: The Andy Warhol Museum
Agency: MARC USA, Pittsburgh
Chief Creative Officer: Bryan Hadlock
Creative Director, Art Director: Josh Blasingame
Associate Creative Director, Writer: Greg Edwards
Associate Creative Director, Art Director: Craig Ferrence
Copywriter: Alyssa Davis
Art Directors: Tyler Bergholz, Dave Slinchak
Photographer: Russ Quackenbush
Retouching: Chris Bodie
| |
Ms. Langsdorf drew the Doomsday Clock for the June 1947 cover of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists as a way to evoke the potential devastation of nuclear weapons.
| |
The donation assists a planned $300 million museum project, which will house the David Geffen Theater.
| |
The taxicabs in Denver are a bit hornier than usual, and it's all science's fault. Carmichael Lynch put ornamental mammoth tusks on a fleet of cabs to drum up attention for the Denver Museum of Nature & Science's "Mammoths and Mastodons: Titans of the Ice Age" exhibit. The cool thing about this idea is that when the exhibit ends, they can keep the tusks and do cab jousts for charity.
 |
 |
This is site is run by Sascha Endlicher, M.A., during ungodly late night hours. Wanna know more about him? Connect via Social Media by jumping to about.me/sascha.endlicher.
