The campaign featured hundreds of unique executions, the vast majority of which were outdoor. We went beyond a traditional campaign to create a series of innovative and world-first stunts, reaching people out in the world as they were engaging with their passions. Hundreds of objects were created and left out in the world for enthusiasts to stumble across.

The UK is home to nearly 70 million people with an enormous range of interests. People who largely don’t feel like museums reflect those interests. The V&A museums are a UK institution, with over 2.8 million items in the collection, spanning 5000 years of human creativity. And it’s not just statues and paintings, which can be the misperception. There are video games, contemporary fashion, technology, music memorabilia… the list is endless. In fact, it’s the most eclectic and wide-ranging museum collection in the UK, with something that will appeal to everyone, regardless of their individual interests.

Most people in the UK have heard of the V&A but less than a third felt familiar with the museum and its collection. Further qualitative research revealed our audience didn’t think the museum had anything relevant to their interests. But once we’d spoken to them at length about all the objects in the museum’s collection, they conceded there was in fact plenty for them to see and enjoy at the V&A.

Our campaign therefore had to familiarise this audience with the museum as a focus group discussion would. In short, we had to prove the V&A was relevant to people’s interests.

Our communications therefore aimed for relevance at all cost through forensic targeting, matching objects from the collection to the kinds of people who would be most likely to be interested in them.

The campaign gained 37 million impressions as a result of online virality and widespread coverage in the national press, which was 98% positive. Searches for the V&A shot up 23% over the course of the campaign, and searches for the campaign’s featured items in the V&A collection went up by up to 12,000%. There were more than 300k engagements with the campaign’s content on social media.

‘If you’re into it, it’s in the V&A’ successfully changed perceptions of the museum. People are now 47% more likely to say the V&A is a place for me and 51% more likely to say it’s relevant to them. Awareness increased by 28%. But the campaign didn’t just shift opinion, it changed behaviour too. People are 56% more likely to recommend the V&A to someone and 37% more likely to visit.

A large proportion of our hundreds of executions were ambient. We left bottles on the shores of the Thames for mudlarkers, buried tankards for metal detectorists to find, left fake 90s rave shirts and jeans with custom leather patches in vintage stores, rebound books in bookshops, pots in antiques stores, and guitar straps in music shops, added golf balls into circulation at driving ranges, displayed watches with custom faces in watch shops, doctored keyboards in technology stores, and hid bookmarks in library books. There were many more too numerous to mention.