Evansville Museum Ad Campaign

This assignment involved picking a local business from a list and coming up with a nice ad campaign for it. Surprisingly, most of the class picked the Evansville Museum along with me. They're a privately run museum that's currently trying to raise the money needed for an expansion. They have a lot of neat exhibits but not a lot to capture the public interest. Therefore, I first sat down and considered what the museum already HAD that could bring in the public.

My favorite part of the museum in my youth was the replicas of Lincoln's home and other period shops and homes, so I focused a lot on Lincoln and log cabins in my initial sketches. They also have the EMTRAC museum that has an actual train you can check out, and a planetarium. I also tried to think of more cost-effective means of advertising, because they obviously don't have a huge ad budget.



I really liked my idea to create postcards that could be folded into interesting things. I had a log cabin, a "planetarium" that you could pop on top of a flashlight, a train, and other silly things.

When Dave looked at my sketches he wondered what my obsession with Lincoln was and when I replied that I was trying to focus on the stuff that they had to attract customers, he encouraged me to perhaps think of some stuff that the museum NEEDED that could also attract guests.

Upon researching other museums, I decided that our museum needed DINOSAURS and a cafe. They're located right on the river, providing what would be a really nice view for visitors that would like to drink some coffee and sit a spell.

My ideas were distilled down to some final concepts.



First, I created my billboard. It would set the standard for everything afterward. The image is from the Stock Exchange as so many of my images are! The font used for "celestial" is from Blambot, I think, as so many of my fonts are.



Some of my classmates weren't wild about the font, so I changed it out for my final draft. Font from Blambot yet again, I believe!



Next, I created the buswrap. It is difficult to find a usable dinosaur skeleton just lying around, you know? I eventually settled on this one, just for the purposes of the assignment. The bus is from the Stock Exchange, yet again~ I really wanted to find a usable image of the buses our own METS uses but could not. I took photos of our buses but they didn't work well once I plopped them in Photoshop. The billboard and building itself were my only usable photos, actually.



Third is the magazine ad! This is my favorite one. Why do I have such love for a dying medium?? The picture of the river is by myself, and the coffee is from the Stock Exchange. When it was all said and done, someone remarked that it reminded them of another ad campaign from someplace... Like Jimmy John's or something? I guess by the way the words are stacked. But... I LIKE stacking words... ;)



Lastly is my "installation." The EMTRAC was NEVER open when I had a chance to come down and take photos, and as I said, most of what I took didn't work well anyway. I had the idea to make a sort of installation along the building using train tracks and a replica train, but that just didn't pan out. Instead I created a huge banner! With a train I took from the Stock Exchange. It really wasn't detailed enough to make a good banner image, though. Curse you, trains!