The campaign featured hundreds of unique executions in a wide variety of media. Alongside more traditional poster and press advertising, we pioneered dozens of innovative and original special media sites, from the backs of football shirts, embroidered flags, engraved bottles and century-old buried silver tankards, re-bound books, and hand-painted miniature Warhammer figurines, to hacking in-game mechanics to place ads in GTA Online, and beyond.

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.

‘If you’re into it, it’s in the V&A’ heroed the breadth and variety of the museum’s collection to correct the misperception that it has nothing relevant to people’s interests. We first took a data-driven approach to identifying our audience’s passions. Then we methodically went about targeting them, by creating a series of unique executions bearing our campaign message, and showcasing them where and when our data told us people would be engaging with their passions. We worked with curators, creators, and influencers alike to prove the truth of our proposition and pay tribute to the nation’s obsessions in the process.

It wasn’t enough just to run a traditional campaign. People are into a vast array of things, but advertising isn’t always one of them. We needed to speak to our audience as and when they were engaging with their passions, in such a way as to pay tribute to their dearly-held interests. ‘If you’re into it, it’s in the V&A’ therefore had to travel to the places and publications the public held dear, no matter how niche the interest or unconventional the location. Interrupting people while they’re doing their thing is a risky strategy, so we had to take our message to people in ways that would surprise and delight them.

We first worked with curators to showcase 70 different objects across out of home, press, digital and social media, reaching the general public and the most passionate of collectors alike. We ran posters in contextually relevant OOH locations, and long copy adverts in special interest magazines such as the Angling Times. In every imaginable media space, we spoke to people’s passions as they were engaging in them.

And then we went even further. We bound books, dedicated theatre seats, knitted custom sweaters, hacked GTA Online, and buried engraved silverware, creating a range of innovative and world-first stunts in relevant locations for enthusiasts to stumble across and enjoy. The campaign ran to hundreds of unique executions, reaching people in scores of completely original ways and never-before-seen locations.

The campaign gained 37 million impressions as a result of online virality and widespread coverage in the national press. 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. Online sentiment was 98% positive.

‘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.

This campaign was specifically designed to resonate with niche audiences, no matter how small. As well as the wider campaign across OOH, press and socials, we created ultra-specific executions. Some of these were exclusively for hobbyists to find, including engraved tankards buried in the Oxfordshire countryside for metal detectorists to dig up, and watches with customised faces pawned in London watch shops. We mirrored this in press, targeting anglers in Angling Times, football fans in FourFourTwo, ragga lovers in Echoes, and gamers in T3.

Alongside this activity, niche content creators crafted unique and authentic items covering everything from knitwear to pottery, each featuring variations on our campaign line, designed to generate conversation and earned media within specific communities, both in the real world and online.