MOCA ads aim for name recognition
By Daily Bruin Staff
April 22, 2001 9:00 p.m.
 As part of the Museum of Contemporary Art’s current
advertising campaign, this billboard, titled "Nudes," appears on
top of a strip bar.
By Yoona Cho
Daily Bruin Contributor
The Museum of Contemporary Art has a new advertising campaign,
and a new strategy, targeted at attracting an audience younger than
the traditional museum-going crowd.
“MOCA’s primary goal was to create name
awareness,” said MOCA Communications Director Mary Louise
Rutberg, of the ad campaign.
Mary Anderson, the account director handling the MOCA ad
campaign at the TBWAChiatDay advertising firm, said that the new
advertising strategy devised by the museum was definitely an
unconventional one.
“The MOCA wanted to target a younger demographic with this
ad campaign ““ the 25- to 34-year-old range. And, to do this,
we had to go where the people were,” she said.
“This particular group of people is very media-savvy and
it’s hard to impress them, so we felt that we really needed
to do something special, that we needed to break out of the mold in
order to reach this audience.”
The resultant “something special” was the creation
of those little and not-so-little ads that are becoming
ubiquitous throughout California, especially Los Angeles.
Anderson said the purpose of such billboards as “Woman in Car
Reading Billboard, 2001″ or “Beautiful People Standing
Around Hotel Lobbies,” located on Sunset Boulevard, is to
make the viewers of the ads feel a certain affinity with, or
relation to, the communities and ideas being presented, and, hence,
to the ads and MOCA as well.
“What the design team did, is they literally drove around
the city in a car and stopped at spots around Los Angeles for
creative inspiration,” Anderson said. “To reach our
target audience, we felt that we really needed to go to the places
where our target audience was and where they worked and played in
order to create a campaign that would really relate to
them.”
In terms of the million dollars spent on the campaign to reach
their target audience, Rutberg asserted that the amount of the
expenditure was justified.
 Museum of Contemporary Art A wire hanger, "Ugly Stepchild
of the Wooden Hanger," constitutes an element of an ad campaign for
the Museum of Contemporary Art. “First of all, not all media
markets are created equal, especially in terms of media
costs,” she said. “L.A. is a real media challenge.
It’s physically immense, very ethnically diverse “¦ And
if you look at Nielson research, major museums are spending at high
advertising levels even when they have brand recognition and
equity.
“It would be nice if we lived in an environment where
non-profits such as MOCA were given greater consideration in terms
of their media buying costs, but we’re out there pitching and
paying for our audience share right along with everyone else in the
nonprofit and for-profit world, including corporate giants,”
she continued.
Nathan Lloyd, however, a fourth-year political science student
pointed to a possible glitch in this “million-dollar”
campaign ““ not everyone might get the joke that the ads are
mimicking museum labels and are hence implying that the various
aspects featured in their ads are themselves contemporary art.
“Now that I know what the ads are supposed to be it makes
a lot more sense and it definitely makes the ads more clever, but I
wouldn’t have figured that out on my own,” Lloyd said.
“I know a lot of people who don’t know that (the MOCA
ads) are supposed to be museum labels.”
But, Rutberg countered this critique and believes that people
understand the ads even if they are not art or museum fans.
“While some fans of the advertising campaign are familiar
with the art world, the comments we’ve received indicate that
our target audience registers the campaign whether or not they are
frequent “˜culture consumers,'” she said.
Anderson also pointed out that, though there has been criticism
about the fact that everyone may not understand that, among other
things, the ads are labels, there is a distinct difference of
perspective among the critics, advertising agency, client and
audience.
“On our side, TBWAChiatDay has gotten nothing but praise
in the advertising world “¦ the criticism that the campaign
has gotten is really more in the art world, and we’re not a
part of that,” she said. “In advertising terms, all the
publicity generated by critiques is great … We get discussed and
our names are really out there, which is exactly what we
wanted."
In response to criticism that the MOCA and TBWAChiatDay might
be usurping the role of the artist in creating contemporary art,
Anderson made it clear that from the standpoint of the creative
team responsible for the MOCA ad campaign, this is essentially not
an issue.
“We do not think of ourselves as artists,” Anderson
said. “We are not creating art, we are advertisers. We want
to raise awareness about contemporary art and get people to look
around them, which is part of what contemporary artists do, but I
want to make it clear that the design team and I do not consider
ourselves artists.”
However, whether the MOCA campaign is successful in roping in a
new audience remains to be seen. The campaign will have reached an
estimated 119,432,2000 people, according to Rutberg, during the
period from January to June, but the actual physical results of the
campaign are unknown.
“We won’t know for a while what impact the campaign
has had on attendance or interest in MOCA because it takes time to
accumulate those numbers, but we are conducting post-campaign
studies on and off-site that should yield some results later this
spring.”
ART: The MOCA ad campaign can be seen around
L.A. through June 2001.
