Download - Jay Chiat Awards

HELPING PEOPLE
SEE THE WORLD
THROUGH
THE EYES
OF DALÍ

SUMMARY
Help people see the world in the way Dalí saw it. That was the simple idea behind the
launch of the Dalí Museum GoodPak, developed to draw attention to the opening of the
Dalí Museum’s new building in St. Petersburg, Florida. Despite having no budget, it was
an idea seen by over five million people, and it created a new revenue stream of over
$50,000 for a nonprofit institution.
At its heart, it is a case about how the creative use of technology is changing marketing
as we’ve known it, creating communication products rather than merely communicating
a product. It’s a case about planning partnerships and leveraging existing platforms, not
just making another “shiny object” that’s increasingly likely to be “born to die” rather than
built to last. It’s a case about doing interesting things in the belief that interesting things
will happen as a result. And finally, it’s about creating communication that is interesting
enough that people are willing not just to participate with it, but also to pay for it.

A LOCAL MUSEUM THAT DESERVED
GREATER-THAN-LOCAL APPEAL
In downtown St. Petersburg lies one of the most comprehensive private collections of
Salvador Dalí’s work in the world.
After 29 years, the Dalí Museum was ready to move into a new building as surreal as the art
on its walls. But this commitment to a new building, and the attached financial demands,
meant the museum had to get more people to visit.
DON’T SIMPLY COMMUNICATE A PRODUCT;
CREATE A COMMUNICATIONS PRODUCT
Advertising has historically worked on the assumption that you need to rent media space in
order to communicate a product. We borrow attention through renting media to temporarily
transmit a message.
One of the most profound implications of the rise and pervasiveness of technology is that
it has allowed us to think differently about the nature of communication.
Now we can create our own media space that can live (theoretically) forever rather than
temporarily fill the space of others. We can spend our money on making compelling
content and experiences rather than spending 90% of our budget on distribution.
Technology offered us a huge opportunity.

TECHNOLOGY SET US FREE
The work of Salvador Dalí and the Surrealist movement was far more than simply the
creation of stunning art that changed the art world. It was a philosophical and cultural
movement; it aimed to revolutionize human experience by challenging what the Surrealists
saw as repressive customs and structures.
As with art, so with “advertising.”
Using communication to merely distribute art from the museum to outside its walls didn’t
live up to the museum’s mission to “educate the public and promote understanding,
education and examination of the works of Dalí and other artists with a similar vision.” 1
Instead, we began to think there was a huge opportunity to create an experience that would
help people look at the world differently. In fact, this became our strategic imperative:
Help people see the world through the eyes of Dalí.
1 Dalí Museum Mission Statement

AN EXPERIENCE THAT COULD HELP US BUILD A BRIDGE
BETWEEN THE MUSEUM AND CULTURE
Marketing is inherently narcissistic; it’s obsessed with what we do and what we have to
offer, rather than with what people are interested in. While some key museums prosper,
museums in general are becoming increasingly less relevant to people’s lives, and the
number of people visiting art museums is in long-term decline. In 2010 less than one in
five Americans visited an art museum, down by 5% over the last eight years. 2 Less people
were visiting art museums than those who played FarmVille or used a smartphone.
So we thought about what people were interested in and worked back from there.
And the rise of smartphones struck us as something we could potentially leverage.
This placed in most people’s hands not only a powerful computing device, but also
a lens they could use to view the world.
More people were taking and sharing photos than ever before. Every month more than
three billion photos are uploaded to Facebook. And one of the top categories in the iTunes
App Store and Android Market is the photo-editing app.
We realized we could help people see the world through Dalí’s eyes by creating a photoediting
app. In doing so, we would build a bridge between what we did and what people
were interested in and already doing. It would get people to participate with the museum
and its work outside its walls. And as an added benefit, it was an idea that was inherently
social and had media baked in: people could share what they had “seen” with others by
uploading their photos to their social networks.
2 Source: National Endowment for the Arts

HUMILITY
As a typically arrogant ad agency, we presented the idea to the client, who immediately fell
in love with it and didn’t blink when we said, “Don’t worry, we’ll make the app and get it up
for distribution on the iTunes App Store.”
We then regained control of our senses. A huge number of apps available in the iTunes
App Store are never downloaded. Of those that are, 26% are downloaded, used once and
then never used again. 3 Failure is pretty much the norm.
If we were to be successful, we had to be humble and plan for partnership, not just
product or communications. In the summer of 2010, the most popular photo-editing
app was Hipstamatic. It had been downloaded 1.2 million times, and there was an active
community sharing their Hipstamatic “prints” online.
We approached the founders of Hipstamatic to see if they would be willing to partner
with us. Serendipity struck. The founders had studied fine art, were huge lovers of Dalí
and Surrealism and were keen to give back to the art community. We developed something
bigger than we would have been able to pull off alone.
3 http://techcrunch.com/2011/03/15/mobile-app-users-are-both-fickle-and-loyal-study/

THE DALÍ MUSEUM GOODPAK
The folks at Hipstamatic loved the idea of helping people see the everyday world through
the eyes of Dalí enough to agree to donate their production time for free. This, by itself,
was a huge deal, as we had removed our production—not just media—costs. But this was
just the beginning.
Together, we created the “Dalí Museum GoodPak.” This was a photo-editing “lens” that
used the idea of “startling juxtapositions” that lay at the core of the “Surrealist Manifesto”
and then “printed” this image with a painterly effect.
The Pak would be on sale to Hipstamatic users in their in-app store for a limited time—i.e.,
the two months leading up to the launch of the new museum building on January 1, 2011.
By making the product perishable, we hoped to drive not just downloads, but newsworthiness.
But perhaps the most important piece of the partnership was that Hipstamatic agreed to
donate all their revenue from sales to the museum, so we not only had reduced costs to
zero, but also had created a potential new revenue stream for the museum. The museum
would receive $0.70 every time someone downloaded their piece of communication.

LAUNCHING THE PAK
One of the most powerful things about partnering with Hipstamatic was that it came with
an inbuilt network of 1.2 million users, many of whom actively shared their prints online.
We wanted to turn this network of users into media for the GoodPak and, in turn, the
Dalí Museum. We launched the Pak with an outreach to the Hipstamatic community on
their website and Facebook page. We announced a competition in which users could
upload their prints using the Pak to a competition page on the Hipstamatic site. The short
list of 100 prints would be decided by the votes of the community, so we encouraged
people to share and campaign for their prints. The final short list would be judged by
John Waters, film director and Dalí fan, with the ten best being exhibited inside the
museum when it launched and the winner flown in to enjoy the opening gala. Finally,
we let the community know that all the prints would be projected onto the building
during the museum’s launch party. They could literally be part of the new museum.

RESULTS
The Dalí Museum opened its new building to a blaze of publicity and admissions that far
surpassed expectations—they are three times what they were at the old building. 4 There are
many more factors at play here than the GoodPak, but we believe this was a key driver of
awareness and fame, and it contributed to a successful launch.
We can, however, quantify the direct impact of the idea. During the course of its two-month
life-span, the Dalí Museum GoodPak …
• was purchased more than 80,000 times, directly generating more than $55,000
in new, additional revenue for the museum 5
• generated over 19,000 mentions in blogs, social networks and forums 6
• generated 2,834 photo submissions to the competition judged by John Waters 7
Furthermore, the idea, due to its inherently social nature, created media beyond simply the
number of people who downloaded it. If we assume that half of those who downloaded and
used the Pak shared a photo on Facebook (a very conservative assumption), and that each
of those had, on average, 130 friends, 8 then we can assume that over five million people
were exposed to a piece of communication about the new Dalí Museum.
Finally, the idea has been awarded at numerous creative award shows, from the ANDYs to
D&AD. While this may all sound like a creative pat on the back, its success in winning a
Next award at the AICP show means we have been able to place a small piece of the
Dalí Museum in the permanent collection of the MoMA—proof that being small, nimble
and smart has allowed a relatively unknown museum in St. Petersburg to invade a much
larger cultural institution.
4 Dalí Museum 7 "Channel your Inner Salvador" Hipstamatic Contest
5 Confidential Hipstamatic sales data 8 http://www.facebook.com/press/info.php?statistics
6 Social Mention