Direct and digital marketing
Prepare a 1,000-word report that presents critical evaluation of selected direct and digital marketing tools in the context of the suitability of those tools to promote the exhibition(s) at the Wallace Collection (case study)
BRIEF
This year, we will be working with The Wallace Collection
(https://www.wallacecollection.org/) to propose a direct and digital marketing strategy to promote one or more of their exhibitions.
The Client Brief is a ‘live’ brief provided by The Wallace Collection.
The full brief is provided by the Director of Communications, Kathryn Havelock from The Wallace Collection.
Frans Hals: Male Portraits & Rubens: Reuniting the Great Landscapes The Wallace Collection, London
www.wallacecollection.org
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/wallacemuseum
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/wallacecollection
Twitter: https://twitter.com/WallaceMuseum
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/user/TheWallacecollection
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/2191663/
What is The Wallace Collection?
The Wallace Collection is an internationally outstanding collection housed in Hertford House in London, which contains unsurpassed masterpieces of old master paintings, decorative arts, sculpture, furniture, metalwork, arms and armour and porcelain. The art collection alone includes works by Titian, Rubens, Velázquez, Fragonard, Gainsborough, Frans Hals and Canaletto. As a national collection, it is one of the finest and most celebrated collections in the world.
The works were originally collected by the first four Marquesses of Hertford and Sir Richard Wallace. Sir Richard Wallace is believed to have been the fourth Marquess’ illegitimate son, but he was never acknowledged as such and there is unfortunately no definitive evidence one way or the other. After growing up in France, he became the fourth Marquess’ secretary and agent, and on his death inherited most of his property including most of the artworks.
Richard Wallace thus became a very rich man, and was a great philanthropist both in France and in Britain, and for this he was eventually made a baronet. He continued the fourth Marquess’ collecting habits, adding to the existing collection important collections of medieval and Renaissance objects and European arms and armour. His main focus was on objects that had belonged to important people and had a direct connection to significant historical events.
The house, where the Wallace Collection is housed today, was began in 1776 when the Duke of Manchester acquired ground on the north side of Manchester Square to form the centrepiece of a new square named in his honour. In 1797, the 2nd Marquess of Hertford acquired the lease of Manchester House for his principal London residence, and since then it has been passed down through the family. When Sir Richard Wallace inherited the house, he changed the name from Manchester House to Hertford House in honour of his late father, the 4th Marquess of Hertford.
Richard Wallace died in 1890 and left everything to his wife, Julie Amelie Castelnau, otherwise known as Lady Wallace. Sir Richard had expressed the wish that his collection might become a museum after his death, but it was Lady Wallace who left almost all the artworks to the nation as a museum when she died in 1897. Lady Wallace chose the name,
The Wallace Collection, presumably as fitting memorial to her husband. According to Lady Wallace’s will, no items are to be added to the collection or removed from it, so the collection remains largely as Sir Richard left it. After some debate by the government on how best to house the art collection, the museum opened to the public on 25th June 1900 and excluding times of crisis has been open ever since for visitors to enjoy Sir Richard Wallace’s wonderful legacy of around 5,500 works of art in a beautiful and historic setting.
The Wallace Collection is funded through a combination of self-generated commercial income from private events, retail sales, the restaurant, and exhibition and event ticket income; grant-in-aid income from DCMS; fundraising and sponsorship and endowment investment income. The Collection is a Non-Departmental Public Body sponsored by DCMS, and is a charity exempt from registration under the Charities Act 2011, with DCMS as its principal regulator.
It has a staff team of around 95 people, around 40 of whom are office-based and the remainder are based in the galleries providing services for invigilation, security and front of house visitor assistants. The Collection is open every day and entry is free. Admission charges are occasionally applied to temporary exhibitions. The Collection operates a membership scheme whereby members gain free entry to all exhibitions along with discounts in the café and shop, and currently has around 500 members.
In 2018, the Wallace Collection opened new exhibition galleries, and has since hosted renowned temporary exhibitions on founder Sir Richard Wallace, the artist Henry Moore, and the enormously popular Forgotten Masters: Indian Painting for the East India Company, which received 36,000 visitors in 2020.
In 2019, the Wallace Collection posed a reinterpretation of the articles of the original bequest (which held that the Collection remain together and not be added to) to the Charity Commission, on the basis that the terms do not expressly forbid lending or borrowing. The Charity Commission granted an Order, supported by the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS), meaning that the Wallace Collection could thereafter lend works from its collections nationally and internationally. The first loan was announced shortly thereafter, which was the loan of Titian’s Perseus and Andromeda lent to the National Gallery for its current Titian exhibition.
This decision to lend works on a temporary basis will open up possibilities for new international collaborations between the Wallace Collection and other institutions, and open up new ways for Wallace Collection artworks to be viewed and interpreted. It will also mean that the Wallace Collection can attract a higher quality of loans for its own temporary exhibitions because it is now able to reciprocate with its own loan artworks.
In June 2020, the Wallace Collection commemorated its 120th birthday, and in light of the present circumstances with the Covid-19 pandemic, used this date to publicly announce its reopening following a four-month closure to help halt the spread of the disease. This was accompanied by a range of digital content including an online talk, blogs and social media posts. The museum reopened on 15 July 2020, with a set route around the permanent collection, and a limited daily visitor capacity.
The restaurant remains closed, as it is not commercially viable to open with a limited number of visitors and social distancing in place. The museum shop is open and has been expanded into the former cloakroom space (no longer in use) for greater social distancing.
In 2022, the Wallace Collection will host two temporary exhibitions; each centred around one of the masterpieces in the Collection.
What is the Rubens exhibition about?
For the first time in over two hundred years, Peter Paul Rubens’s (1577-1640) two great masterpieces of landscape painting, The Rainbow Landscape (The Wallace Collection) and A View of Het Steen in the Early Morning (The National Gallery) will be reunited as part of an exhibition at the Wallace Collection. Although kept together in Rubens’s own collection, the paintings were brought to London in 1803, and separated for good with The Rainbow Landscape eventually entering the Wallace Collection and A View of Het Steen in the Early Morning, the National Gallery collection.
Painted as a companion pair, these sweeping panoramic works show Rubens’s newly acquired manor house and estate, Het Steen, at Elewijt (between Brussels and Antwerp) as it was in about 1636. They both celebrate the fertile countryside of Brabant, and pay homage to the great Flemish tradition of landscape painting. The exhibition will explore these paintings as the culmination of Rubens’s practice as a landscape painter, offering new insights into how they were developed as compositions through new technical imaging and photography, together with a newly commissioned documentary exploring Rubens’s work.
Key Exhibition Information
Exhibition dates: 19 April 2022 – 13 September 2022
Exhibition hashtag: #ReunitingRubens
The exhibition will be free but ticketed.
Tickets will go on sale in January 2022.
The exhibition is sponsored by VISITFLANDERS.
Direct & Digital Marketing Strategy 10 The exhibition will be publicly announced in October 2021.
The exhibition will be accompanied by a range of paid-for online talks and courses.
The total communications budget is £20,000.
What is the Frans Hals exhibition about?
In autumn 2021, The Wallace Collection will celebrate Frans Hals’s most famous and beloved painting, The Laughing Cavalier. Since it entered the Collection in 1865 as the only work by Hals, this iconic image – the Dutch version of the Mona Lisa – has never been seen together with other works by the artist.
For the first time, this great masterpiece will be showcased alongside Hals’s other portraits of men in order to explore the master’s highly innovative approach to male portraiture, from the beginning of his career in the 1610s until the end of his life in 1666.
This exhibition – the first ever show to focus solely on Hals’s portraits of men posing on their own, as well as the first to focus on his most famous picture, The Laughing Cavalier at the Wallace Collection – will bring together a careful selection of fifteen of the artist’s best male portraits from around the world. The exhibition demonstrates how, through pose and virtuosic painterly technique, Hals completely revolutionised the male portrait into something entirely new and fresh, capturing and revealing his sitters’ characters like no one else before him. It will also offer a deep understanding of the evolution of Hals’s style, which is especially evident in his male portraits, from finely painted to increasingly free and loose handling in his later years
Key Exhibition Information
Exhibition dates: 22 September 2022 – 30 January 2023
Exhibition hashtag: #FransHals
There will be an admission charge for the exhibition.
Tickets will go on sale in June 2022.
There is no sponsor currently confirmed.
The exhibition was publicly announced in October 2021.
The exhibition will be accompanied by a range of paid-for online talks and courses.
The total communications budget is £40,000
Last Completed Projects
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