Washington, DC, 2022 —
In a city with more free museums than anywhere in the world, how can we convince visitors to buy tickets to a museum that has lower unaided awareness, and is further away from the others?
Our goal was to increase awareness of the museum as tourism roared back to life post-pandemic, and ultimately to increase ticket sales.
Based on sales data, we knew that folks buy tickets when they're already in DC, even though the museum attracts many visitors from out of state. So we focused the campaign exclusively on DC, and bought targeted out of home placements across the city paired with hypertargeted ads for people who are within a few blocks of the National Mall.
The creative idea was simple: DC isn't just the capital city of the US. It's the worldwide capital of spycraft — more spies are in DC than anywhere else in the world. We used this statistic to pique viewers' interest in spycraft with location aware ads.
In 2022, online ticket sales rose 31%.
The average order value increased by 10.8%.
