The Museum of the City of New York (MCNY) is a history and art museum in Manhattan, New York which was founded to preserve and present the history of New York City and its people. ESM has worked with MCNY since 2016 as their primary marketing and media partner for all exhibition, branding, and awareness related initiatives.
Museum of the City of New York
Company Bio
Overview
- Industry: Travel & Tourism
- Location: New York, NY
Overview
The Ask
MCNY came to ESM with the primary marketing goals for improving their brand recognition such as:
- Increasing their overall attendance
- Expanding their email lists
In addition, other campaign initiatives included general museum awareness, exhibition promotion, grant advertising management in partnership with the US Chamber of Congress, boosting venue rentals, driving online sales, and increasing memberships.
The Challenge
The biggest challenge that MCNY faced was closing their doors due to Covid-19, and pivoting their marketing strategy to focus on new goals such as online sales or continuing to connect with their members in the digital space. Once plans to reopen came to fruition, ESM was able to expand on the existing media strategy we had created, and also explore new ways to provide the best return on investment.
Why it Worked
The Approach
In addition to our years of brand and exhibit support, we sought to extend the revenue streams through the promotion of venue rentals and museum memberships. This multi-faceted approach enables better consistency throughout fluctuations in tourism.
The Solution
ESM utilized exhibition-specific creative assets across various placements including audience data targeting, whitelist top sites, retargeting, list matching, and lookalike audience building on social and digital platforms to reach users with a potential interest in MCNY’s upcoming exhibits.
We also launched lead generation initiatives to gather leads and grow the museum’s email list for future use. The audience for this campaign included both a core audience (demographic targeting) as well as a custom audience based on the list of lookalike users, compiled from the current list.
Results
Campaign Results
Over a three year period, we can see the measurable improvements to the total attendance and the total number of users on MCNY’s email list as a result of our media campaigns.
Attendance
243,841
2019
278,203
2020
Email List
120,000
2019
121,000
2020