merit
The Strong National Museum of Play, located in Rochester, NY, is one of the nation’s leading destinations for families. A 90,000-square-foot expansion brought the attraction to new levels, adding the Video Game Hall of Fame and interactive exhibits for a more immersive experience.
We needed a way to attract out-of-state visitors to The Strong, and it had to be powerful enough to get families who didn’t already know and love The Strong to make time in their packed schedules to visit.
Our insight was that parents better connect with their kids when they’re able to reconnect with their own childhood.
So our idea was to game the interstate system:
We created the “Path to Play” — a series of sequential, billboard-sized breadcrumbs from Cleveland, Pittsburgh, and Toronto, to the Thruway and right to The Strong. We didn’t have enough budget to saturate these cities with a traditional, multi-pronged media buy. So we made spontaneity our secret weapon and supplemented our billboards with Pac-man style aerial games and geo-targeted mobile ads to reach our players on their gaming devices through Waze and Google apps, adding digital breadcrumbs as they searched along their routes.
With the new museum expansion, we were tasked with helping The Strong reach increased attendance goals, particularly with out-of-state visitors.
Work also needed to overcome confusion and inertia — as Rochester isn’t known for its sandy beaches or bustling metropolitan thoroughfares. If you’re going to drive four hours, it better be worth it!
While The Strong invested heavily in making their museum fun, immersive, and Instagram-ready — that didn’t leave much budget to get the word out. To hit their attendance goals, we would need to get people informed, excited and enroute almost simultaneously. That takes kid-like energy. Or in this case, inner-child energy.
Our solution was to tap into adults’ dormant inner-child with these two audiences:
The planners and decision-makers for family fun (affectionately known as “moms-in-charge”) who meticulously plan family calendars..
Kids-at-heart were a secondary audience for us with many of the same motivations. They grew up on video and classic games and continue to play to this day. We knew our work needed to cast a halo out to these fun-loving adults as well as drive traffic to The Strong.
We created a gamified billboard campaign featuring classic toys and games from The Strong’s Toy Hall of Fame, that could strike the heartstrings of our Moms in Charge/Kids at Heart audience. Boards lined the highways of three cities that were within a 4 hour drive of The Strong, since research showed that more and more families are opting for road trips, and museums are among the top 3 types of family travel.
More than 100 million players joined our game (measured by 108.6 million impressions of the campaign), which drove a 700% increase in traffic to the Strong website. This increased again by 966% with the addition of aerial banners to amplify the campaign.
We selected Cleveland, Pittsburgh and Toronto because they were in our “Goldilocks zone.” They had large family populations, cars and were just a roadtrip’s distance away. Toronto alone saw 5 million drivers crossing into New York every year. (Source: U.S. Dept of Transportation, Bureau of Transportation Statistics.)
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