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At the center of the 360° “Come Find Yourselfs” campaign announcing Meow Wolf’s newest exhibit in Grapevine, Texas is a launch film, which follows an uncanny squad of mall walkers as they zip into their matching neon tracksuits and take a march through their local mall in the name of multi-self-discovery. With a custom soundtrack evoking full mall nostalgia, a setting that exists outside of space & time, and plenty of unfamiliar faces, the film gives viewers a mind-expanding taste of what awaits them at Meow Wolf’s latest & greatest exhibition.
Meow Wolf’s mission is to redefine how art & storytelling can make a positive difference in the world. Their core values of collaborative creativity, provocative playfulness, & maintaining an ‘outsiders are welcome here’ mentality were critical to the brief & informed this work from the very start. The campaign is meant to serve as a mind-bending invitation for anyone & everyone to come explore this new Meow Wolf Grapevine dimension and feel empowered to discover various “selfs.” The objective of the campaign was to not just make a splash, but to make huge waves that resulted in this latest exhibition opening being Meow Wolf’s biggest yet, in terms of ticket sales & social traffic.
Because Meow Wolf is such a brain-altering, insanely fun & warmly welcoming experience, the goal of this campaign was to pay homage to that through the lens of nostalgic mall culture–given that you literally have to walk through a mall to get to the actual Meow Wolf Grapevine exhibit itself. The resulting 360° campaign–built around a friendly, off-kilter invitation to “Come Find Yourselfs”–features everything from eye-opening OOH, to head-turning interactive experiences, to a mind-bending :60 mall commercial. The film itself follows an unexpected community of mall walkers as they power walk through a suburban mall in search of a transformative experience via Meow Wolf. The mall walkers offer surreal testimonials and self-affirmations as they traverse an increasingly strange landscape & explore new depths of their own individual imaginations. The results? Tickets for the exhibit SOLD OUT within two weeks of the campaign launch, and the campaign achieved 93 Million total impressions; gained over 40,000 new Instagram followers for Meow Wolf Grapevine; and generated over 345 unique media articles across publications with 4.7 Billion unique visitors per month.
The art collective, Meow Wolf, has gained somewhat of a cult following with their mind bending, almost hallucinogenic interactive experiences. Because their newest exhibition was opening inside a suburban shopping mall–in a former Bed, Bath & Beyond store, to be exact–we decided to lean into that strange choice for a location. And of course, in the 1980s & 90s, shopping malls acted as both a gathering place and a springboard into unexpected encounters & experiences, and this campaign launched when social media-based nostalgia for these bygone cultural touchstones was seemingly at an all-time high.
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