So, we used social media (mostly Facebook and Twitter) to speak to London-based artists (c.170 of the most influential digital artists, identified using Search DNA technology) and invited them to a dedicated preview exhibition, courtesy of the V&A, in order that they could talk, blog, tweet, and post about it before anyone else (including journalists), delivering the necessary kudos to this opinion-forming community to spread the word.

We added more people outside London (a total of 300 influential digital artists) to take part in a launch programme called Recode. The V&A commissioned headline exhibitor (Karsten Schmidt) to create a new piece for the campaign and open up the source code to this work; people were given the opportunity to play with this code to create their own piece (hence the “Recode” terminology). The Recoded work was entered into a competition (posted using Flickr or Vimeo); the best featuring on the V&A’s microsite and a cross-track digital projection campaign on the London Underground. We then kept in touch with the 300 influencers on a one-to-one basis for 3 months, mostly using Twitter to share updates on the event etc. Critically, we kept influential people active, engaged and interested in spreading the word to secure the patronage of the wider community at large over a sustained period of time.

Based on our social media activity, the campaign delivered:

1. Over 1K features across a range of social media channels (tweets, blog features, message boards).
2. Over 3K downloads of the digital code (10+ downloads for every artist engaged).
3. Multiple features across online news/industry publications.

In commercial terms, the revenue generated from ticket sales (within and without the identified community) comfortably covered the campaign costs many times over and this campaign has since won multiple industry awards.