Download - Jay Chiat Awards

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