In the spring of 2020 the plan for Museumweek was finished. Then every museum in the Netherlands closed.
I'd been working with the Museumvereniging for a while by then. We'd made their audio identity when they rebranded: a short signature that could sit at the end of a spot, and melodic enough to come back year after year without wearing out. It had already carried Museumweek 2019, and every edition came with its own theme and sometimes a different agency.
And now the whole thing had to move online. Within weeks.
The sound didn't have to be reinvented
This is the part I still think about. Everything that relied on people physically walking into a museum had to become something else. But the sound was already there. We didn't need a new track, a new idea, a new brief. We needed to change how we used what we had.
So we did. Earlier editions were curious and fairly light. This one had to carry the fact that people couldn't get together. We made it quieter, gave it more space, and changed the mix completely, because a campaign you watch alone at home on headphones is a very different thing from a TV spot that plays while people are chatting in the living room.
It still sounded like the Museumvereniging. That was the whole point.
Why that worked: the boring document
I'd love to tell you it was the music. It wasn't really. It was the guidelines.
When we made the identity, we also wrote down how it works. Which intervals make up the motif. Which instruments go with which mood. And what's not allowed: no tempo above a certain point, no synths over historical material, and never cut the motif off before its last note.
That document is what let us change the tone completely without losing the brand. Without it, 2020 would have been a new track, and the years of recognition before it would have been thrown away.
What it did
Museumweek 2020 got 120,000 unique online visitors, with every museum closed. Traffic was up 124% on the year before, and the Effie jury named it the most effective way to reach people who don't go to museums often. The audio was one part of that campaign, of course, not the reason for it. But a familiar sound helped a fully online week feel like the real thing.
What I took from it
A campaign track is made for one moment. A sonic identity is made for the moments you can't see coming. You don't find out which one you've got when things go to plan. You find out when they don't.
If you're working on an identity right now, ask your studio one thing: what happens to this sound if next year looks completely different? If the answer is "we'll make a new one", you're buying a track.