This paper shows how the Art Institute of Chicago (AIC), one of America’s biggest, most respected art museums and a must-see destination for visitors to Chicago, used innovative media and communications to reengage with

the one audience that was still staying away in droves: local Chicagoans.

• 75% of annual paid visitors to AIC were out-of-towners. Too many local Chicagoans saw the museum as unapproachable and intimidating, a place for serious art enthusiasts and critics. Instead, they preferred to visit

“friendlier” local attractions like the Lincoln Park Zoo.

• With an upcoming Van Gogh exhibition featuring all three of his ‘bedroom paintings’ brought together for the first time, AIC needed to find a way to take something that’s a big deal to art scholars and make it irresistible

and inviting to all Chicagoans.

• The breakthrough came with an insight into the nature of the relationship between art and audiences: that on some level great paintings don’t just speak to us as spectators – they draw us in and involve us as voyeurs.

• The result was a campaign inviting audiences to step inside Van Gogh’s world, and to Let Yourself In to the bedroom of a troubled genius. Quite literally so, too: at the center of the campaign was an exact physical reconstruction of Van Gogh’s bedroom, which was made available to rent on Airbnb.

• The campaign led to the AIC’s most successful exhibition in 15 years, with total audiences up 54% against previous shows (and some daily attendance figures up 70%). More than this, local attendance grew by 97%.

• In fact, the majority of visitors to Van Gogh were locals, which was unprecedented. A total of 234,415 Chicagoans visited versus just under 200,000 out-of-towners – successfully switching the balance of visitors from tourists to locals for the first time in nearly a decade.

• As a result, the exhibition yielded $6.6M in museum revenue, which was 36% higher than the previous most successful show.

• In the short-term, the campaign paid for itself 4 times over, with a ROMI of $4.07:1. And when longer-term uplifts were taken into account, the figure rose to $7.20:1.