Galleries have often used reproductions of artwork in their posters to get people to visit. They don’t show the art in its best light, and they’ve become wallpaper to all but a few art buffs so instead of showing the art, we decided to use words to tell the stories behind it, stories that are as relevant today as they were when the artworks were originally created. This campaign is proof that challenging convention can lead to a better more powerful way to communicate. In a world saturated with the visual - Instagram images, film, video - this campaign has no image. In a society obsessed with snippets of information and 140 characters, it brought back the art of long copy. In an era where ‘he who shouts the loudest wins’, this campaign stripped everything back to just words on a page and the stories they create.

This campaign looked to use high dwell time placements and play with the conventions of media to create deeper more immersive ways to tell the stories behind Tate Britain’s art. We launched with print and OOH and then supported this by distributing 10,000 postcards. We then followed this by creating cinema and radio executions. We also subverted the format of Instagram – showing posts without any image and just text. Finally, we extended our idea by telling the stories in Braille, distributing leaflets in centres for partially sighted people, to show that even people who can’t see the art can feel its power. Combined, these channels encouraged different groups of people to visit the gallery to see the art (or hear it, in the case of blind people) for themselves. The campaign reached 331,601,621 people for a spend of £** (please see Confidential Information).

Despite a limited budget of £** (See Confidential) for all media, the campaign caused a noticeable increase in footfall to the gallery, it created a stir socially and impacted the way in which the everyday person views and understands the art in Tate Britain.

We achieved:

331,552,550 Offline

Outdoor: 23,422,000 | Press: 4,950,571 | Distribution: 94,000 | Radio: 368,000 | Cinema: 302,767,050

968,052 Digital Impacts

Content: 66,852 | Facebook: 577,444 | Twitter: 107,094 | Search: 3,652 | Instagram: 213,010

22,080 Increase in Site Traffic

Content: 977 | Facebook: 12,530 | Twitter: 253 | Search: 117 | Organic: 4,786 | Instagram website clicks: 2,080

Tate Britain placed our postcards and posters in gallery. We also received an abundance of positive comments on social media, with hundreds of people sharing photographs of the work, spreading the campaign further organically.

We are still awaiting some results from the activity in March and April

Art has lost its relevance to mainstream society. It is seen as old fashioned, boring and irrelevant to people’s lives. As a result of this, Tate Britain’s visitor numbers have been declining. This campaign fundamentally changed the way galleries communicate, and beyond that, changed how art is seen by society. Tate has put its art at the heart of modern culture again. Instead of showing people the art, we told only the stories behind it, stories so compelling and resonant that people would have to go and see art and engage with it for themselves.

Art has always been an important part of British culture but the art world has gradually drifted away from the everyday lives of most people. It is full of intellectual superiority and ‘quiet please’. This has alienated all but the white middle classes, so we needed to diversify the audience to include broader age ranges, ethnicities and social classes. We needed to put Tate Britain’s art back at the heart of British culture by making it feel relevant to people’s lives today. The campaign ran across a number of channels to allow people to engage in different ways. These channels included print, outdoor, cinema, radio, social and direct. In each case, we picked high quality, high dwell time placements to allow people the time to read the stories, but we also subverted these traditionally visual formats by deliberately not showing the art but telling the stories behind them.

Tate Britain’s footfall was declining and they were struggling to get people outside of the usual ‘art crowd’ to visit the gallery. The brief was to revitalise the gallery and make it appeal to a broader audience. Overall objectives were to increase footfall and to make people care about art again.