Galleries have often used reproductions of artwork in their posters to try and attract visitors. 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. Stories so compelling it would make people want to go to the gallery to see the art for themselves. This campaign is proof that challenging convention can lead to a better more powerful way to communicate. In a world saturated with Instagram images, film, video and image reproductions this campaign has no image. In a world of ‘he who shouts the loudest wins’ this campaign is stripped back to just words and the stories they create.

Gallery advertising is a convention.

Usually featuring a picture of the art, with an overload of boring information and sponsor logos.

Gallery advertising isn’t working.

We didn’t want this work to resemble advertising.

Emotive, provocative stories discovered in places you wouldn’t expect.

All set in the Tate Gallery’s typeface, the copy was set, then photographed and re-set so as to create imbalance.

All placed on an off white, sterile background leaving only the words to do the job for a visual client.

Anti-design. With the smallest, emotive typographic nods to the power in the stories.

Despite a limited budget of £**** (See Confidential Information) for all media, the campaign caused a noticeable increase in gallery footfall, 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 Impacts

Outdoor: 23,382,000 | Press: 4,941,500 | 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 & April.

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 and 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. The budget was £**** (See Confidential Information) and this delivered reach of 331,601,621.