When searching for museum advertisements online, I stumbled upon an old image of an eye-catching billboard featuring Nighthawks by Edward Hopper, the famous painting of four lost souls hanging out in a barren all-night diner, a beacon of light against a sea of darkness. The billboard was standing strong against a beautiful blue sky and I loved the idea of bringing art outside the museum, even if it was as brief as a car passing on the freeway. The billboard also displayed a hashtag, #ArtEverywhereUS, and the number 36. I began to do some digging and unearthed a fantastic advertising campaign from 2014 complete with analytics, that was created and funded by the Outdoor Advertising Association of America (OAAA).
Earlier that year, the OAAA commissioned a case study to identify problems facing the Out of Home (OOH) advertising industry. The OOH Case Study determined that OOH advertising, “had not been valued as it should be despite significant advances and improvements over recent years.”
Their solution was to “find a way to showcase OOH advertising’s key attributes of innovation, ubiquity, and creative impact. The answer was a public celebration of great American art that inspired art appreciation, expanded knowledge about art, boosted national pride, and increased museum awareness.”
In order to do this, the OAAA partnered with Nielsen and the Art Institute of Chicago, the Dallas Museum of Art, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the National Gallery of Art, Washington DC and the Whitney Museum of American Art. Each museum allowed their paintings to be reproduced across thousands of billboards and bus stops from coast to coast. The funding was done completely by the OAAA and was inspired by a similar program in the United Kingdom from 2013.
“The museums narrowed the number of paintings in contention for Art Everywhere U.S. to 100, and the public was invited to vote for their favorites online,” (https://porteradvertising.com/art-everywhere-us/ ).
This initial phase was a great way to garner public interest for the project and give art lovers a reminder to head to their local museum. According to Nielsen, “more than 50,000 creative executions were deployed across 26,041 media units,” (Nielsen On Location Report: Art Everywhere US). In their research they found that 7.6% of the total US population aged 18 or older reported awareness of the campaign each week, equaling a reach of approximately 17.5 million people with the highest measured awareness being amongst young adults ages 18-34.
This research shows that this advertising campaign was effectively reaching millennials who are a crucial target audience for museums. In terms of recognition and consideration, 74% of those who personally saw a piece of artwork from the project felt they were “much more interested in visiting an art museum.”
In terms of return on investment (ROI), it was significant for the OAAA and the participating art museums, as well as art museums in general, due to the OOH campaign’s number of views and highly favorable survey metrics. In addition to the OOH advertising, the campaign also successfully generated likes and comments on social media, and gross ratings points via news outlet coverage, thus generating even more recognition and consideration for museum visits and personal recommendations.
The Art Institute’s mission statement is lengthy, but it includes the following, “We are a place of gathering; we foster the exchange of ideas and inspire an expansive, inclusive understanding of human creativity,” (https://www.artic.edu/about-us/identity). Therefore, this OAAA-funded campaign did a great job of also supporting the Art Institute’s mission, because it successfully communicated its messages of “art appreciation, expanded knowledge about art, boosted national pride, and increased museum awareness” to the museum’s primary target audience.
Douglas Druick, the Director of the Art Institute at the time of this project, told the Chicago Reader, “‘what is astonishing here is the competition between images...It is wonderful to see how these iconic works of art hold their own and rivet attention even in a busy intersection,’” (Did Anyone Really See Art Everywhere US?).
The study done by Nielsen also helped the museums involved get a feel for the effectiveness and reach of the advertisements, and provided a blueprint for their ad spend that remains relevant even today. Social media was the leading cause for awareness of the campaign, with 40% of people learning about it on Youtube and 27% of people learning about it on Facebook (Nielsen On Location Report: Art Everywhere US). An additional 17% of people learned about it through a movie theater preview, another OOH advertising vehicle.
As museums eventually look for ways to generate foot traffic in a pandemic and post-pandemic world, the results of this campaign will be hard to replicate. However, the advertising channels used will be there for them again if they care to use them, but the collaboration on the campaign will be even more critical to get people to put down their screens and view the originals.
SOURCES
https://oaaa.org/LinkClick.aspx?fileticket=3LkX8XKdJW0%3D&tabid=313&portalid=0&mid=877
https://porteradvertising.com/art-everywhere-us/
https://oaaa.org/Portals/0/pdf/research/Art%20Everywhere%20Campaign%20Nielsen%20Report%202014.pdf
https://www.artic.edu/about-us/identity
https://chicagoreader.com/arts-culture/did-anyone-really-see-art-everywhere-us/