ROM: We’ve missed you
Spec campaign | Art direction and copy: Zachary Zulauf
The brief: The Royal Ontario Museum is reopening after months of COVID closures. Get Torontonians back through the doors.
The insight: Everyone assumed people missed the museum. Flip it. The collection has been sitting in the dark for months with nobody to look at. The museum missed them more.
The idea: Turn the collection into characters who’ve been bored out of their minds without visitors, and let them say so. A brachiosaurus stretched the full length of a TTC streetcar: “Looooong time, no see.” A sloth on a transit shelter: “Come hang.” Two terracotta warriors on a billboard: “Bored stiff.” Each headline is a pun the artifact earns, and every execution signs off the same way: we’ve missed you.
OOH was the obvious call. People were back on the streets before they were back inside anything, so the museum met them there.