OMG! I’m in S.M.A.K!
VRT - Canvas
Issue 42 | March 2017
Agency
mortierbrigade
Creative Team
Creative Direction Jens Mortier Joost Berends Philippe De Ceuster Creative Team Jan Schoofs & Babo Schokker
Production Team
Producer Lore Meert Digital Director Pieter Nijs Creative Developer Bert Vermeire Digital Client Service Director Tamara Schauvliege
Date
October – November 2016
Background
Culture Club was a new show on Belgian TV channel 'Canvas'. It sought connections between high art and pop culture. The mission was to create a social media campaign to promote this new show.
Idea
People were given the chance to feel what it is like to have their artistic endeavours hung on the wall of one of Europe's most prestigious contemporary art museums: the S.M.A.K. in Ghent. By instagramming with #cultureclubinsmak, their work instantly appeared on the museum's wall, right next to Andy Warhol, Francis Bacon and Marina Abramovic. On a live stream they could see how visitors reacted to their work. And an online gallery of every work posted was kept.
S.M.A.K.'s high art was connected with Instagram's pop culture. Proving that Andy Warhol was right, when he said, "In the future, everyone will have their 15 minutes of fame."
Results
Culture Club became the talk of the town on Instagram: people posted more than 7,000 works with the hashtag, ranging from promising artists to shameless selfies, meta art, food pics and the inevitable cats and dogs.
A leading Belgian newspaper picked up the idea and published its five favourite works every week.
Our Thoughts
At Directory we love advertising that gets people to do things.
Not just click and like and share but to express themselves and become a part of the brand activity. And this campaign from an agency with innovation in its DNA certainly does that.
If you believe in the rule of nine, then for every one of the 7,000 people who bothered to take a photo and upload it, 63,000 of their friends and followers came to have a look and shared the photo so a further 600,000 people got to see the image and hear about Culture Club – pretty much every one of them exactly the sort of person they wanted to reach.
This beautiful example of targeting through social media would never have worked without such a simple creative idea: you too can be an artist not just in name but in deed, even if it’s only for a few moments.