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. Typography and design was meticulously chosen to fit into the world of each interest group.

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.

Posters and press were designed with simplicity in mind, allowing the unexpectedness of featured V&A objects to shine alongside bold and challenging headlines. With regards to the extended campaign, it was crucial that the art direction of every special execution both followed the unique design cues of the target audience’s interest to create objects that would pay tribute to an audience’s passions, as well as feel part of a cohesive whole campaign. Everything had to be authentic. That’s why it wouldn’t be enough to bury any old piece of tin, for example, it had to be a century-old tankard that itself would appeal to metal detectorists. This thinking was carried through to the art direction of all other objects - we had to reward people for discovering our message, not just interrupt them. Objects had to be designed to such a level that they themselves were appealing to an obsessive.