Okay, I'm behind the times on this one.

Okay, I am miles behind the times with these awesome ads created by Jenny Burrows and Matt Kappler.  I saw them back when they first made the rounds of the internets, and they came to mind again as I struggled with that age-old question, how do you get people in the door?

Museums all over the country are faced with the constant dilemma of how to make a collection that is generally fairly static continuously appealing to an increasing demographic.  More simply, the population can be divided into two categories: people who like to visit museums, and people who don't yet realize how awesome museums are.  The tricky task museum marketing departments face is to make the latter group members of the former.  There's a number of issues tied up in it, but there are two main choices an institution can make: they can bring in an exhibit that is a departure from their general collection to draw in new visitors, or they can take Jenny and Matt's route and use a bold new strategy to make new visitors more interested in the existing collection.

Bringing in a different type of exhibit is usually a successful strategy, but it has its risks.  An institution can alienate its core visitors if it brings in too many exhibits that differ from its main collections, and if the temporary exhibitions continue to vary widely, the museum can lose its identity in an effort to be more popular.  (Not too far different than the plot of that old Patrick Dempsey movie, Can't Buy Me Love, right?)  A bold marketing strategy is probably a better overall plan, as it wins followers for your core collections, but it can be much harder to get right.  A great campaign like the one above can hit just the right notes and make folks who would normally walk past an institution walk inside, but a near miss can end up as an expensive mistake--especially for museums that don't have a lot of money to spend on their ads.

It's easy for museums to seem out-of-date by their very nature; they are buildings full of facts and artifacts and bits of the past.  A really great ad campaign can remind all the people who keep meaning to stop by why they should do it, and ads like the one above can even shift the perspective of regular museum visitors and let them see old collections in a new light.    I wish there were more folks out there like Jenny Burrows and Matt Kappler out there trying to get the public to see old museums with new eyes.