Guerilla marketing for museums

I read this post on http://www.museummarketing.co.uk/?p=404 and it really made me think. In what ways can museums get the attention of visitors? What does a good advertising campaign need? How do you attract new visitors and other target groups? This Post doesn't directly connect to my issue , except from being about museums, but I think this way of marketing is really interesting and I was wondering if something like this would also work with educational museum projects?

" Guerrilla marketing for museums

Yesterday I wrote about the need for museums to be more creative with their advertising campaigns and I thought I’d continue that theme with a couple of interesting guerrilla marketing projects which got people talking.

Museum marketing for $2

Seatle Art Museum used $2 bills for a beautifully simple promotion which capitalizes on the fact that the picture of the declaration of independence in an upcoming exhibition is also depicted on the banknote.

The museum used the notes as change at it’s ticket desk, shop and café. Each $2 had a sticker promoting ‘Life Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness’ featured a painting which was illustrated on the reverse of the note.

This is a low cost campaign which used an imaginative gimmick to get people talking about the museum and the exhibition.

Naked museum marketing

In 2005 The Leopold Museum in Vienna certainly got people talking with it’s promotion for The Naked Truth, an exhibition of early 1900s erotic art.

The museum let anyone who came to the exhibition naked or in a bathing suit get in free. Many people took the museum up on its offer including 52-year-old Bettina Huth who visited the museum topless. Huth didn’t understand what all the fuss was about saying, “I go into the steam bath every week, so I’m used to being naked.”

Peter Weinhaeupl, the museum’s Director said the goal was to offer people a means to beat the sweltering heat and to create a mini-scandal the way the exhibited works of Gustav Klimt, Egon Schiele, Oskar Kokoschka and others did a century ago.

The idea got people talking about the exhibition, attracted large visitor numbers and got attention from international press. "