Collections Online
Auckland War Memorial Museum
Museums & Galleries
In 2013 Auckland Museum began the process of making all of it’s collections available online. A task which is still underway as several million objects are digitised, catalogued and uploaded with as much rich data and information as possible.
Shortly before the digitisation of the first milestone, 1,000,000 records online the marketing team were tasked with providing a key visual to celebrate this achievement and create an awareness campaign to drive traffic to this online collections portal.
The tagline “bringing our collections to life.” became the focus of the campaign and from here a series of concepts were developed. Ultimately we favoured the idea of creating a 3D rendered natural science specimen as a charismatic mascot for Collections Online.
The Huia Bird was chosen as a symbol for collections online, the extinct species embodied the concept of bringing collections to life and the historical data available allowed us to create a Huia that not only looked like a living species but acted like one as well.Working with our creative studio a digital Huia slowly came to life with careful attention to existing museum specimens, historical data and the patient advice from our natural science curators.
Collections Online has consistent visitation from research and education audiences receiving many hundreds of thousands of visits per year.
The focus of the digital campaign was to reach new audiences that are representative of the physical visitors to the museum including children and families.The digital campaign focused on social media content and social media advertising with different edits of the main promotional video with audience targeted copy.
