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Campaign Spotlight

Ads Ask You to ‘Picture’ Philadelphia as an Art Destination

The long-in-gestation, and highly contentious, move of a famed museum to an urban home is the springboard for a campaign that celebrates not only the museum but also its new neighbors and neighborhood.

The campaign began last week, timed to the opening on Saturday of the museum, the Barnes Foundation, in a $150 million building in Center City Philadelphia after decades in the nearby suburb of Merion, Pa. The campaign plays up the new location of the Barnes on Benjamin Franklin Parkway, near institutions like the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Rodin Museum, as well as other attractions in the City of Brotherly Love.

The goal of the campaign is to establish Philadelphia as a destination for art buffs the way it is for history buffs. The campaign carries the theme “With art Philadelphia,” echoing “With love, Philadelphia,” the longtime theme of ads from the Greater Philadelphia Tourism Marketing Corporation.

The three words of the theme appear on a logo for the campaign, depicting three pins of the type visitors to museums receive to affix to their lapels. (It took some doing to squeeze “Philadelphia” onto a lapel pin; the letters are stacked to read “Phil/Adel/Phia.”)

Five agencies are collaborating on the campaign, which includes traditional media like magazine ads and transit posters along with online ads, social media and public relations. The social media elements include a feature on Foursquare that lets users “check into a masterpiece” rather than a venue or event.

The campaign, with a budget estimated at $2 million over the next two years, is being sponsored by the tourism marketing organization and more than a dozen other organizations, associations, foundations and institutions.

They include the City of Philadelphia, the Philadelphia Convention and Visitors Bureau, the Greater Philadelphia Cultural Alliance, the State of Pennsylvania, the Barnes, three other museums and the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society.

The goal of “With art Philadelphia” is to promote the city as a destination for those who love the visual arts. (“Philadelphia is for art lovers” would probably have been deemed too similar to the long-running “Virginia is for lovers” campaign, which promotes tourism in Virginia.)

The centerpiece of the campaign is the Web site withart.visitphilly.com, which invites potential visitors to “Curate your own experience” from, among other attractions, museums, exhibitions, tours and artworks.

“Philadelphia is one of the world’s great art destinations,” text on the Web site begins, “with incomparable art institutions, priceless artworks and one of the largest collections of public art in the country.”

“Browse the new Barnes Foundation Philadelphia campus and the Philadelphia Museum of Art on the culturally rich Benjamin Franklin Parkway,” the text continues, “and discover incredible public gardens, world-class museums and more.”

The Web site also calls the parkway “the most artistic mile in the country,” seeking to create an image of a “museum mile” or “museum row” in Center City Philadelphia to draw visitors who would like more than one or two art experiences when they travel.

Last summer, recalls Meryl Levitz, president and chief executive of the Philadelphia tourism marketing organization, the leaders of the Barnes, the Philadelphia Museum of Art and a third institution, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, sought a meeting with her organization and city officials.

They said that “the opening of the Barnes shouldn’t be the finish line,” Ms. Levitz says. “It should be the open door” — in other words, after the Barnes opened, they wanted to “keep the momentum going.”

“So we formed a collaborative, for the first time,” she adds, and decided that “the essentials” of the campaign would include “one logo, one tag line, one Web site,” to make it easier to woo visitors who may be interested in the visual arts attractions in Philadelphia.

The ads that are part of the “With art Philadelphia” campaign will “have an entirely different tone and tenor,” Ms. Levitz says, from the ads that are part of the “With love, Philadelphia” campaign, although in some instances ads will carry both themes.

The “Curate your own experience” aspect of the campaign “is based on what our Philadelphia brand is: independence,” she adds, meaning that it is “not limited by a set of walls” in any one attraction.

“This was best captured by the Zoe Strauss exhibit” put on early this year by the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Ms. Levitz says, which “burst out of the walls” of the museum and appeared “on billboards around town.” (There were 54 billboards in dozens of Philadelphia neighborhoods, each of them displaying a photograph by Ms. Strauss.) The focus on “Curate your own experience” is also “partly because that’s what we feel younger audiences are looking for,” Ms. Levitz says.

The extensive presence of the campaign in social media is, of course, also intended to reflect the penchant of younger consumers to use the Web sites of companies like Facebook, Foursquare, Pinterest and Twitter.

The intent is to “engage people, and help them to be engaged,” says Sharon Rossi, vice president for advertising at the tourism marketing organization.

Engagement is necessary to encourage action, Ms. Levitz says, to move a visit to Philadelphia from someone’s to-do list “to action.”

She recalls fondly a cartoon that appeared in The New Yorker magazine in 1996, during a successful Cézanne exhibition at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. The cartoon, by Donald Reilly, depicts an arty-looking man and woman chatting outdoors in what looks to be the Hamptons.

Image
Images from the Web site of With Art Philadelphia.

“Cézanne has always been my man,” the woman hears the man say, “but is he worth a trip to Philadelphia?”

Just as Philadelphia has evolved in the minds of many from a city “with a food scene” to “a great food destination,” Ms. Levitz says, so, too, do all those involved with the campaign hope travelers come to believe that “now, with this collection of collections, it would be hard to ignore Philadelphia as a visual arts destination.”

The ads seek to cultivate that belief by shining a bright light on the treasures in the museums that are banding together for the campaign.

For instance, one magazine ad features “The Card Players” by Cézanne, on display at the Barnes, next to this headline: “How do you curate the most artistic mile in the country? With more Cézannes than France and an amuse-bouche to celebrate.”

The text explains, describing the Barnes as possessing “the largest collection of Renoirs in the world and more Cézannes than in all of France.”

“You can also wander through 200 galleries at the Philadelphia Museum of Art,” the ad continues. “Get lost in gardens cultivated by the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society. And sample treats that appeal to the palate as well as the palette.”

“From the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts to the Penn Museum and beyond,” the ad concludes, “Philadelphia offers a world of art to explore.” The logo and the words “Curate your own experience” are at the bottom of the ad along with the Web address visitphilly.com/withart (which redirects to withart.visitphilly.com).

Another magazine ad, aimed at lovers of contemporary art, displays a painting from 2008 by a black artist, Kehinde Wiley, “Three Wise Men Greeting Entry Into Lagos,” on display at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.

“How do you curate the most artistic mile in the country?” the ad asks, like the first ad. The answer in this ad: “Contemporary art and a discussion with your contemporaries over coffee.”

“Within one artistic mile, you can have thousands of experiences,” the text begins. “Check out the contemporary art at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. Take in the impressive collection of Impressionist and early Modernist paintings at the Barnes Foundation. Get up close and personal with modern works in the Philadelphia Museum of Art.”

“Then relax with a latte and reflect on the wonder of it all,” the ad continues, before concluding with the same promise that “Philadelphia offers a world of art to explore.”

The phrase about “the most artistic mile” was created by Red Tettemer & Partners in Philadelphia, one of the five agencies collaborating on the campaign.

“We came up with the phrase,” says Steve Red, chief creative officer at Red Tettemer, adding with a laugh, “We didn’t count it.”

“We know as Philadelphians we have a pretty good art scene,” says Mr. Red, who calls himself “kind of an art nut, being an art director by trade.”

And “we happen to have a few folks” at the agency “who are passionate about the arts scene here,” he adds, and they expressed “a lot of interest” in working on the campaign.

The “superexciting thing about the Barnes Foundation coming to Center City,” Mr. Red says, is that if “you put it together with” the other nearby museums it would mean “we were going to have this amazing experience in Philly.”

“We think what we have can appeal to folks around the world,” he adds, so the “With art Philadelphia” campaign will have a broader reach than the “With love, Philadelphia” campaign, which is primarily aimed at people who live “90 miles in either direction” of the city and can drive in for a visit.

Red Tettemer worked with Foursquare to create the “masterpiece” program to “check into specific pieces of art,” a total of 12 “across the different museums.”

The dozen artworks include “The Large Bathers” by Cézanne and “The Gates of Hell” by Rodin. “You can have in your Foursquare stream, ‘I’m checking in to “The Gates of Hell,” ’ ” Mr. Red says, laughing.

The other agencies working on the campaign are Buzz Marketing, Culture Works, MayoSeitz Media and Rockstar Entertainment. Also, Bluecadet Interactive worked on the withart.visitphilly.com Web site.

The campaign, needless to say, does not address any of the disputatious back story of the relocation of the Barnes to Philadelphia. It came after the foundation’s finances “fell into disarray,” Time magazine reports, which was followed by “institutional mismanagement, political gamesmanship and bad faith.”

The move was “mired in controversy,” according to a report on “CBS Sunday Morning With Charles Osgood,” “applauded by some and condemned by others.”

There are those who said the tale about a fight over an art collection valued in the neighborhood of $25 billion had all the ingredients for a movie. And indeed, there was a documentary released in 2009, titled “The Art of the Steal,” about the struggle for control of the Barnes’s collection.

If you like In Advertising, be sure to read the Advertising column that runs Monday through Friday in the Business Day section of The New York Times print edition and on nytimes.com. And read coverage anytime of advertising, marketing, television, print, movies and new media on the Media Decoder blog at mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com.

A correction was made on 
May 22, 2012

Because of an omission in a list provided by the Greater Philadelphia Tourism Marketing Corporation, an earlier version of this article failed to mention an agency, Bluecadet Interactive, that worked on the withart.visitphilly.com Web site, which markets the city as an art destination.

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