Recode - Decode
Issue 16 | September 2010
Agency
Saint@RKCR/Y&R
Creative Team
Creative Director: David Gamble; Art Director: Rodrigo Lebrun; Creatives: Rajeev Basu, Peter Brown
Production Team
Project Director: Chris Jefford; Project Manager: Ellen Chng; Designers: Shaban Siddiq, Sharon Chong, Dave Price; Flash Scripters: Nick Watton, Ali Kember; Planning Director: Mark Sng; Programmer: John Cleveley
Other Credits
Digital Artist: Karsten Schmidt (PostSpectacular)
Date
November 2009
Background
The Victoria & Albert Museum is the world’s greatest museum dedicated to design and the arts. They wanted a campaign to promote their first exhibition dedicated to digital art.
Idea
World-famous digital artist Karsten Schmidt created an interactive art application which people could use to create their own unique digital masterpiece. The best Recodes were used in the advertising.
Seeding the idea with a hundred digital art and design influencers, buzz helped generate interest in both the competition and the exhibition.
A shop in Westfield Shopping Centre was turned into an extended exhibition space for Karsten Schmidt’s work and for Recoded ideas.
Results
The campaign helped attract 95,000 people to the exhibition, over 230% of the original target. ‘Recode | Decode’ garnered significant coverage in press, including NMA (site of the week). It was featured 1,122 times across social media channels and in 69 features across online news/ industry publications.
Online the campaign reached a total of 1.57 million unique users and generated an ROI for the V&A of over 1,000%.
Our Thoughts
The idea of open-sourcing the posters for the exhibition seems entirely relevant to me in a way many open-sourcing ideas are not. It reaches out to artists and invites them to become a part of the exhibition. Of course, it also gets them to provide additional word-of-mouth to swell attendances to what might otherwise have been a funny little show tucked away at the back of the museum.
The images are all so beautiful, our apologies for only giving them two pages.
For me, it is also a huge pleasure to see two digital creative directors doing such great work because I gave David Gamble and Simon Labbett their first jobs in the mid-90’s when no-one quite knew where digital was going to take us. And now look. It’s taken us to the V&A.