V&A East Museum Media Buying

Award outcome

Description

We are launching our new museum in east London on April 18, 2026. The launch of V&A East Museum is a pivotal moment for the V&A. It presents a unique opportunity to attract both existing and entirely new audiences. We needed a holistic media strategy that will not only attract entirely new audiences but also span the launch of the Museum and its inaugural temporary exhibition - The Music is Black: A British Story. In order to reach these new audiences who wouldn't normally consider going to a Museum, we needed a bespoke media campaign that would show up unlike any campaign the target audience will have experienced from a museum. For this campaign, we opted to use Manning Gottlieb OMD (a division of OMD Group Limited) as the provider of Media Services under CCS framework agreement RM6123. We chose this framework as it offered a compliant and speedy route to market with a single supplier that had an excellent reputation, and our initial conversation with them showed that they could meet their brief. Despite our intention to use the CCS framework, it has since emerged that this is not feasible because: 1. This is a complicated and bespoke campaign. Once the strategy was handed to the OMD government buying team, it became apparent that there were extra layers of approval baked into the framework agreement that we (and the OMD planning team) were not aware of. 2. The approval process would apply to the V&A because of our classification as a central government authority. However, the framework agreement does not take into account our Cultural Freedom Bodies Freedoms Charter that exempt us from the spend control for advertising, marketing, and communications. 3. There are approvals required because of non-standard special build out-of-home elements of the campaign. These elements are key for reaching these new audiences. 4. The approvals required under the CCS framework would delay our campaign to the point where it would not meet the timescales of our launch, severely affecting our ability to market these historic events. We'll also lose our opportunity to interact with the audiences and seed the story of the museum before it opens.

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