When you think of the latest innovations that are allowing museums around the world to reach new audiences, perhaps snail jokes aren’t top of your list. But a museum in Pittsburgh has proved that a simple idea well executed can win over a new generation of fans.
Carnegie Museum of Natural History has attracted millions views of films of Tim Pearce, a curator at the museum telling snail jokes on the video-sharing social networking website TikTok.
The app is popular with 13-21 year old’s, with over 1 billion people downloading it. That makes it bigger than Instagram.
The content is mainly around dancing, singing and lip synching to music, movies or sound bites. Users create short looped videos, then have the option of adding music and Snapchat style stickers or filters. While hashtags make the content searchable.
The fun content makes it appeal to teenagers. And it would seem that teenagers like snails.
Carnegie Museum of Natural History have posted 12 films on TikTok, with the most viewed attracting over 1.5 million views. That’s more people than visited all four institutions in the Carnegie Museums Of Pittsburgh group last year.
Art is known for pushing the boundaries in a number of different ways. But what happens when museums carry this mindset over into their marketing campaigns?
One of the biggest challenges facing any museum is fighting against the preconceived notion that museums are “boring”. The cliched museum is a silent, intimidating space that doesn’t offer much in the way of fun, and while many museums successfully break this mould, the stereotype still exists for many people.
To cut through the stigma and entice new, diverse audiences, it is important for institutions to carefully consider how they develop and deliver bold, powerful marketing campaigns. And while not every campaign idea that involves “blue sky thinking” is worth implementing, there are certainly some quirky and off the wall ideas that retain a special place in our hearts.
I want to take a look at some of my favourite museum campaigns that fall firmly outside the box, in order to show just how impactful the right kind of marketing can be. Let’s take a look.
Everything that we have done so far, what we are doing and what we will do for us is always emotively charged, because heritage without feeling is inconceivable. We are committed to delivering heritage messages to every visitor, because we deeply believe that heritage with its messages can make the world a better place to live for us and generations to come.
We work in the areas of heritage interpretation, (eco) museology and heritology, heritage management and sustainable cultural tourism, combining them with creativity, innovation and multidisciplinary teamwork.
Our greatest achievement is to develop successful, sustainable and outstanding cultural and natural heritage interpretation projects whose main focus is a participatory approach and stakeholder engagement in local communities and their well-being.
Receiving and sharing knowledge is our greatest passion. Collaborating with local communities that come together to celebrate their heritage is our calling. Innovation and social responsibility are our beacons.
Muses Ltd (Muze) was founded in 2005 and since then it has become one of the leading companies for consulting and management in culture and tourism in Croatia and surrounding countries.
Products and services:
Interpretation planning
Conceptual and construction planning of museum exhibitions
Content development and production
Museum planning and production
Strategic planning of cultural tourism destinations and attractions
Audience development planning
Fundraising planning and management
Blended learning trainings in heritage interpretation and heritage management
According to Eileen Hooper-Greenhill, Museum and Gallery Education, Leicester University Press, 1991 (Source: Comment gérer un musée : Manuel pratique, Unesco/ICOM, 2006)
The Corona pandemic has driven art into the digital realm – curator Peter Weibel was already there. Here the ZKM director explains why virtual events dominate reality – and why proximity in the museum is a fiction that is now coming to an end.
Mr Weibel, you curate the Karlsruhe Schlosslichtspiele, among others. How do reality and digital art interact?
The castle light show is a highly technical event. With “Projection Mapping”, images are not simply projected onto a cinema screen. Instead, each group of artists receives a computer-based 3D model of the castle and is then commissioned to incorporate the architecture of the facade into the images. This means that every pixel of the façade becomes part of a composition and is transformed by it. The façade moves, it can collapse or become a waterfall with water coming out of the windows. Through a projected fantasy world one can let the real one sink, so to speak. In the case of the castle light games, one can already see a dominance of the virtual, but the real façade still needs this as a carrier medium.
Sound showers allow a sound message to be broadcast in a targeted manner without disturbing others. You no longer need to wear headphones, they provide freedom and comfort. The sound showers are suitable for use in trade fairs, museums, amusement parks, shops, exhibitions…
Directional sound enclosure that creates sound bubbles. Product used for shops, museums, etc.
The transmitter is made up of 217 independent transmission points offering spatial sound control that is unrivalled in the market. Directed and focused sound. All integrated in a small product.
An exhibition in the heart of the Espace Découverte Energie (Ede).
Visits to EXPO ELECTRO are accompanied by a guide who will tell you all about the history of electricity and will brighten up your exploration of this magnificent building with illuminating anecdotes.
EXPO ELECTRO, permeated by the atmosphere of a former power station which has now been listed as a historic monument, features almost 500 items including a dynamo manufactured in 1896 by René Thury, a Swiss, in whose honour the first hall is named. A second hall acts as a contrast, showing 150 items (Edison bulbs, rectifiers, motors etc.) paying tribute to the genius and father of alternating current, Nikola Tesla.
This story unfolds in the dunes of the Dutch island Texel in a bunker from World War II that has recently been acquired by the Aviation & War Museum Texel.
Visitors crawl into the minds of Georgian soldiers, five days after their bold and bloody uprising. Having to admit failure, they decided it is every man for himself now. In this unique spatial audio experience you listen to the echo of a past that divides the island until today.
Michel de Vaan (lead designer): “This was a chance for us to design a narrative space that uses 3D audio as its only tool. It communicates the story in a very personal manner, but it is also the means to immerse visitors. Most importantly, leaving almost no visual elements allows for visitors to use the most versatile of media: their own minds.”
To create an audio drama that feels authentic, Kossmanndejong collaborated with professional actors and podcast-makers. Wandering through the bunker you will hear different dialogues between people who were in the bunker that day and you will get to understand their dilemma’s. Through a multi-dimensional sound system with very precise geo-tracking you will hear changes in direction and volume depending on where you walk
Bunker Vlijt Texel. Luchtvaart Museum Texel. Photo’s Thijs Wolzak
Its creator was Dennis Severs, an artist who used his visitors’ imaginations as his canvas and who lived in the house in much the same way as its original occupants might have done in the early 18th Century. This he did for his own personal enjoyment as well as for the harvest of an atmosphere, which he then employed to provide the visitor with an extraordinary experience. To enter its door is to pass through a frame into a painting, one with a time and life of its own.
The game is that you interrupt a family of Huguenot silk weavers named Jervis who, though they can still sometimes be heard, seem always to be just out of sight. As you journey off into a silent search through the ten rooms, each lit by fire and candlelight, you receive a number of stimulations to your senses.
It is the smell of food that first aligns your imagination with the faces around you in portraits. Then… Mr. Jervis’ wig, is it not the very same one that hangs over the back of his chair? His meal is only half eaten; did he abandon it when he heard us arrive?
Visitors begin to do what they might if indeed they had travelled through a frame into a painting: use what they sense to piece together the scene they had missed. Thus, and this was Mr Severs’ intention, what you imagine… is his art.
It’s fun and now after almost thirty five years the experience ranks as one of the rarest in the world. David Hockney once rated its effect as standing amongst those of the world’s great opera experiences. Mr Severs spent a lifetime peering past sitters in paintings in search of the light and moods that lie in the air of Other Times. Sharing what he found and created here is what a visit to the house is all about. A rare thing to experience first hand: the warm, smoky light captured by the Old Masters; the creak of footsteps on wood; whispers and opening doors; arresting reflections, mixtures, textures and smells; the ticking and chiming of clocks; a cat and a canary. All this Mr Severs gave while at the same time encircling it with a picture he painted with recorded sound of a larger 18th Century world brooding outside its perimeter. Spellbinding… and at its core something very rare: soul, the bonding warmth of a generous family’s presence.
The experience is conducted in silence. Its level is poetic and unlike anything, so works best on those who are endowed, willing and able to meet it halfway. The house’s motto is “you either see it, or you don’t”. Post-materialist, it seeks to remind the visitor of a specific thing: what we cannot see is essential to what we do.
Be warned, it is a mistake to trivialise or pigeonhole the experience into any of the mothball camps: “heritage”, “local history”, “antiques”, “lifestyle” or “museum”. A visit requires the same style of concentration as does an exhibition of Old Masters.
Dennis Severs called his unique spectators sport “still-life drama”, and his goal was to provide his visitors with a rare moment in which to become as lost in another time as they appear to be in their own. He proved that the formula amounts to the same in any time, that getting caught up in it all is what we call “now”.
