Create your own museum exhibit

The Victoria and Albert (V&A) Museum in London is the world's largest museum of decorative arts and design. Named after Prince Albert and Queen Victoria, it was founded in 1852, and houses a permanent collection of over 4.5 million objects. It has always had a healthy record of mature visitors, so the V&A wanted to find a way to connect with a younger audience.

The V&A's first digital art exhibition - 'Decode: Digital Design Sensations' was the perfect opportunity to engage with, and become relevant to younger visitors. To promote the exhibition, the museum needed an inclusive, organic and dynamic campaign that would reflect the nature of the digital art.

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To do this, the V&A team created a completely open source campaign called 'Recode | Decode' that would not just promote the exhibition, but add to it. Working with world-famous digital artist Karsten Schmidt it created an interactive art application, which became the centrepiece of the campaign. The V&A invited members of the public to turn this generic artwork into their own digital masterpiece. The best 'Recodes' were then used to promote the exhibition in an integrated campaign.

With such a tight budget, the campaign needed to generate viral activity to reach its full impact potential. The V&A invited 100 influential digital art and design people to a sneak preview of the exhibition. They began to blog about their experience - with rave reviews.

The V&A then launched Karsten Schmidt's digital artwork for the audience to Recode. PR coverage followed. The outdoor campaign was launched using the Recoded artwork (predominantly on London Underground 6-sheet posters and digital projection screens). Finally, the V&A took over a shop front in the large Westfield shopping centre in west central London as an extended exhibition space for Karsten Schmidt's work and the Recoded work.

Results

This campaign helped attract 95 000 people to the exhibition, which was over 230% of our original target. 'Recode Decode' garnered significant coverage in press, including NMA, Shots and Creative Review.

There were a total of 1122 features published across social media channels and 69 features across online news and industry publications.

The online campaign reached a total of 1.57m unique users and generated an ROI for the V&A of over 1000%.