Bonniers Konsthall is an art gallery in Stockholm that shows contemporary art. We have worked with the brand line “not for all” in a series of excluding campaigns, aiming to position the gallery as an alternative to Stockholm’s more mainstream galleries.

The objective was to draw attention to “Slight Chance”, a solo art exhibition about chance, luck and random coincidence. With a niche offer it´s a hard to pinpoint the right target audience. So instead of directing the message towards a specific group, we created a free invitation and let chance decide who received it. In other words, the recipients of the campaign were picked randomly. Using the essence of exhibition as the basis for our creative idea, we let the recipient experience the theme of the exhibition first hand. The randomly distributed invitations were relevant for the exhibition, and also as an alternative approach for us to attract visitors.

The art exhibition 'Slight Chance' focused on luck, chance and the random coincidences in life. To promote the exhibition and grab people’s attention, we created an ad that in itself was random. In co-operation with DN, Sweden's largest paper, we printed our ad with a random variable. During several occasions during the printing process, we stopped the printer and exchanged the original print-copy of the ad manually. This way we got 2 alternative versions of the ad in the same ad space, in the same paper, the same day. One version contained a free ticket to the exhibition, the other did not. It was art by chance.

The random invitations were received by literally anyone and were received well. The direct mail generated a 20 % response rate and a series of good reactions. People put up thank-you-notes to the mailman, and wrote letters to the postal office thanking for the invitation. The local news and several newspapers picked up the campaign and the exhibition succeeded it´s attendance goal by far. If this was a coincidence or not we couldn´t say, but the randomness of the campaign connected with people. Instead of being just another message our recipients felt lucky and fortunate – which they were.