To raise awareness for this year’s Artisan Series competition, we brought beautiful works of art to one of the ugliest places on Earth: the Internet. To achieve this, we created Artifier, a Google Chrome extension that took other people’s banner ads and turned them into art from the Artisan Series competition.

Artifier beautifies your browsing experience, letting you discover emerging artists from Artisan Series as you browse your favorite websites. The Artifier Chrome extension used over 400 original art pieces created by emerging artists from Artisan Series. All the 400+ art pieces were separated into horizontal, vertical, and square orientations to match common banner sizes and formats. And all the featured artwork was completely unbranded. If you liked one of the works of art that you saw, you just had to hover over the banner to learn more about the art piece and the artist that created it.

We turned the internet into an endless art gallery and people loved it. Thousands of people installed the extension on their Chrome browser and Artisan Series website traffic increased by 155%. Artifier transformed 3.8 million banners a month, that’s a media value of $1 million a year. All of which costs Bombay Sapphire a grand total of $0. In the same way art questions the world, we questioned advertising. But more importantly, we changed the game by pushing advertising into a new frontier.