Remarkable marketing campaigns from MoMA, New York

MoMA is a museum of modern and contemporary art founded in 1929 by three enterprising women who wanted to bring modern art to America. We're located in mid-town Manhattan just a few blocks from Rockefeller Centre and Fifth Avenue. We have always been a museum dedicated to what the founder and the founding director called 'the art of our time' to include traditional arts such as painting, sculpture, drawing and printmaking along with industrial design, film and photography. In recent years we've added departments on media and performance art and have started to incroporate dance and movement into our galleries as well as digital.

In my role there, I'm very fortunate to manage an amazing team. We won't work with a creative agency because we feel that we know our brand very well and we want to keep what is considered the most fun work in house. I'm really fortunate to work with a great and talented group of people and I'm standing on this stage on their shoulders as they are working away back in New York.

I'm going to show you some campaigns and tell you some of the stories behind the stories, some lessons that we've learned, some successes, some failures, and some things that you could apply when you go back to your own organisations. I believe that there is a strong thread connecting all of the arts, that we are more alike than we are different and I think it's something so inspiring to meet people from the theatre and the performing arts.

The story behind the story

A lot of the themes that I'm going to talk about have to do with the approach that artists take in their work. It is all about loosening up, conceding a little bit of control of the overall product and marketing and incorporating the idea of 'play'. One of the things where we have been experimenting with that idea that has been successful is our own identity. At MoMA we have a logo, MoMA with the lower case 'o', that has been around since the 1970s. It was designed by the famous designer Ivan Chermayeff and when we reopened our building in 2004 there was a big discussion about whether our logo should be changed. Everyone decided that the logo was so well known around the world that it was not something that we should mess around with so we redesigned it but very slightly, a little more streamlined, so that people could barely tell. We thought that it would be good to play around with it and created a full-page ad in the New York Times introducing the Fall season with the logo as the starting point.

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Remarkable marketing campaigns from MoMA, New York (PDF)