Van Gogh Highlights

The Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam wanted to bring Van Gogh's letters to the attention with an exhibition on the street and a podcast. When the museum asked us to expand this cross-media campaign with a website, we proposed that the letters from the famous Dutch painter be digitally brought to life and made accessible to the public in an interactive way on the basis of a concept from creative agency Selmore.

So we started to work on a large and permanent expansion of vangoghmuseum.nl that we had previously built for the museum. The starting point was to combine content, storytelling and activation around Van Gogh's letters - as we had also shown with Below the Surface. The landing page should serve as the most important marketing tool during the campaign. It would not only be the place for all letters, but also allow visitors to mark quotations and indicate their own emotions, explain this emotion and share their Van Gogh quote via social media. In addition, the new website should contain podcasts and a temporary exhibition.

This was not an easy feat, but we succeeded. On the Van Gogh landing page, visitors can stroll through the quotations Dutch celebrities marked and browse the 140-year-old letters themselves. Visitors can mark, comment and share favorite passages. This enables them to become part of the traveling exhibition that projects the quotes during the campaign via custom streetlights on the ground, starting at the Museumplein in Amsterdam.

For the new website we built three parts: the quotation page, the search overview and the letter page. As an integral part of the existing Van Gogh Museum site, the campaign page was integrated with the already available Google Analytics implementation in order to measure the marketing efforts and to make improvements after the launch.

In 2019, Van Gogh Highlights won a GLAMi Award in the Marketing & Promotion category at MuseWeb, the world's largest museum conference on innovation.