The Field Museum approached us to create a marketing campaign for their latest hosted exhibition, Bloodsuckers: Legends to Leeches, on loan from the Royal Ontario Museum. The exhibit delves into the scientific wonders of nature’s real-life vampires – blood-feeding creatures like bats and mosquitoes – and also explores their impact on mythology and storytelling. The goal of the advertising was to increase ticket sales and drive more visitors to attend the temporary exhibition.

The Bloodsuckers campaign was designed to instantly capture your attention through bold simplicity. We heightened its impact across all touchpoints by focusing on the word “Bloodsuckers,” illustrations of the exhibition’s subjects, and a large, spotlighted Field Museum logo revealed in the right corner beneath stylized blood drops. We identified the opportunity to use illustration as a way to stand out from concurrent museum and entertainment ad campaigns, while rendering these creatures in a more fantastical style that would appeal to a wide audience of all ages. These dramatic illustrations dynamically break up the exhibition title, suggesting a shattering of expectations around the public perception of these blood-feeders. The prominent use of red, a color not regularly associated with the Field Museum, creates instant stopping power and drives home the connection to the subject matter.