As you may have noticed, the Mammoths of the Ice Age are making their way to the National Museum of Scotland this month for our next major exhibition, Mammoths of the Ice Age, created by The Field Museum, Chicago.
Here in the marketing department, work began on the exhibition way back in July 2013. One of the key roles of the marketing team is to come up with a campaign look and feel that can be rolled out across all of our print and digital communications on and off site and finding something that works well in all of these areas is no mean feat!
The first step when working on any campaign is to identify the target audience through a combination of research, analysing visitor figures and getting to grips with the key messages within the exhibition. Because Mammoths of the Ice Age is a touring exhibition, we had the additional advantage of knowing who the exhibition had been popular with when it had shown at other museums.
The exhibition is full of interactives and interpretation for children as well as adults so we knew that attracting families to the exhibition was key. We also knew that we had to create something that was fun and engaging and creative agency Sumo Design’s idea to illustrate unusual or surprising mammoth facts in a playful way was a clear winner – even if you don’t come to the exhibition you can learn some mammoth facts from the posters!
Of course, the exhibition is still to open so we will have to wait and see if the campaign has been a success but it’s been great to see the graphic style and mammoth facts embraced across the organisation, from a furry launch event invite to the exhibition trailer created by the Digital Media team.
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Over the coming months you should see our mammoth campaign popping up all over Edinburgh, from newspaper adverts and posters in your local café to banners outside the museum and a mammoth bus called Murdo… Keep your eyes peeled!
Mammoths of the Ice Age ran between 24 January-20 April 2014 at the National Museum of Scotland.