Pirates. Thanks to centuries of legend and lore, the name alone conjures up images of swashbuckling, walking the plank and breathtaking adventure. It brings to mind names like Jack Sparrow, One-Eyed Willie, and Captain Hook – exciting, rebellious, intriguing, but nonetheless fiction. So when Chicago's Field Museum opened Real Pirates, an exhibit featuring the only authentic pirate ship ever discovered in US waters, we wondered: how could we create buzz around an exhibit rich in artifacts and history but not quite the fantasized version we've come to know and love? We had an advantage: authenticity - real pirate stories and treasures. We could promise a taste of pirate life from the inside and prove that, sometimes, truth is more intriguing than fiction. We would offer the experience of actually joining the pirate brotherhood and showing what it was like, in the words of Real Pirates, to... go on the account.

DDB and The Field Museum put Mammoth fur on two downtown Chicago double-decker trolley buses to promote “Mammoths and Mastodons: Titans of the Ice Age.”

The Field Museum had a total attendance goal for the exhibition of 212,115 visitors. By August 31st, 345,020 people had come to the museum specifically to see the Real Pirates exhibit, helping to exceed that goal by 63%. In order to create excitement and anticipation and learn more about real pirate life, we wanted visitors to engage and interact before they got to the museum. Our goal was to get 10,000 people to visit the Go On The Account website (GOTA) and 100,000 visitors to the Field Museum website to specifically learn more about Real Pirates. By August 31st, 14,125 people had gone to the GOTA site, exceeding our goal by 41% and by 198,430 people had visited the Field Museum website, nearly double our goal. Additionally, people went online to tweet about Pirates and post pictures of themselves interacting with the pirate installations and communication.