Visitors are used to seeing art from the Peabody Essex Museum’s collection hanging on the walls of its main building on Essex Street, but lately, it has been making an appearance across Greater Boston’s billboards and train stations (not to mention the corners of your computer screen). Derek O’Brien, the museum’s Chief Marketing Officer and head of its many advertising, marketing and content creation efforts, sat down with us to talk about PEM’s newest advertising campaign and how it differs from previous ones.

Q: What’s the role of marketing at an art museum?

Derek: You'll sometimes hear people say, "Oh, no, I'm not a museum person." But when PEM has one of our concerts or another creative event here, I hear so many people say, "Oh, wow. This isn't at all what I expected."

In art museums especially, I think that there is a perception that you need a certain education or background knowledge before you visit. You don't really have that same barrier with, say, music. You hear something, you like it, and nobody questions it.

Part of the role of marketing and communications at a museum is expanding the perception of what a museum experience can be. It's a way to take all of the amazing programs that our colleagues are creating here, and then showcase that to the public in an accessible way — to show the breadth of what the museum has to offer.

Q: Why was this the right moment for a new brand campaign?

Derek: We knew, coming out of the pandemic, that visitor behavior had changed. People's definition of a cultural experience has changed. That umbrella has opened up quite a bit. In market research about the choices potential visitors are making, you see aquariums, parks, zoos, museums, all pooled together. Those definitions drastically change from individual to individual.

I think that people are just spreading the love across various institutions. Repeat visitation has taken a bit of a hit. Research is showing that more people are now going to museums, but they are going to fewer places. For example, before the pandemic, maybe 10 people would visit four museums a year. Now, 20 people are visiting museums, but they're only visiting one per year. The frequency of visitation is going down, but the overall number of people is going up.

That led to PEM embarking on a market research project to figure out what motivates somebody to go to a museum. We wanted to figure out how to tailor our messages to those individuals to attract a more diverse audience than we've seen historically. The only qualifying question was "have you visited a museum at least once in the past three years?" because we wanted a diverse group of candidates to participate. It was across age, ethnicity, household income, orientation — a wide range of demographics. We saw that people's motivation for visiting or not visiting was the same regardless of their demographic information.

We keyed in on behaviors instead, which was interesting, because I had seen most institutions focus on demographic information for their personas, and came up with Learner Lee, Artsy Alex and Social Sam. Learner Lee is represented across a wide range of demographics, but what makes them all similar is their ideal museum experience: They are coming here to learn something new.

Lee's high point for the experience was after they left the museum. Being able to relay the information that they got from their visit — that’s their high. They're more likely to stop at the gift shop, get a memento of their visit, where Artsy Alex is coming just to get inspired by the art. It's not about who painted this, or why, or what medium was used. Their experience high point is very much being in the gallery and seeing all of the pieces. (Social Sam, the research revealed, was motivated by new experiences and events.)

As a part of our recent five-year strategic plan, we knew that attracting a new audience was going to be a priority for a multitude of reasons. We had done a lot of work on the DEIA (diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility) side and knew that we wanted the museum to be more accessible. We also knew that we still had lower attendance than we did pre‑pandemic.

We needed to find a way to reach a new audience. Following all the research, it seemed like the perfect time to reintroduce PEM as a brand.

Q: What made you and PEM choose HATCH as a brand and design partner?

Derek: It had been nearly 20 years since PEM had done a brand campaign. We were heavily reliant on advertising individual traveling exhibitions to promote the museum and get the word out. But a brand campaign differs in that it is promoting PEM, the entire experience. What is it like to be a visitor? What is it that PEM has to offer that you're not going to get at other museums? When we were going through the agency selection process, we were seeking somebody who would be a partner. We really wanted an agency that would come in and be a part of the PEM culture and work closely with our teams so whatever campaign we ended up launching felt authentic.

We've also made a real effort to diversify our vendors here at the museum. We've taken a hard look at accessibility and DEIA not only in how we hire a diverse museum staff, but also, how do we diversify our leadership team? How do we diversify our vendors?

HATCH is a woman‑owned business. They are very plugged into the arts and culture scene and community. CEO Jen Harrington is incredibly involved with Raw Art Works in Lynn. She really understands the art and culture space. Those were all very important pieces for us.

Q: On the HATCH side, what made you choose PEM?

Hatch CEO Jen Harrington: PEM has a long, rich history that gives it a lot of existing brand equity and fascinating brand DNA. We love working with brands like PEM that want to build on the equity that makes them so special so they can connect with new audiences and deepen engagement with the people who already know and love them.

As a team, we’re also passionate about art, culture and museums. One of our creative directors on this project and I were both art history majors. And at HATCH we are believers in and supporters of organizations that educate and provide opportunities for the next generation of artists. So, we were big fans of PEM long before we were partners — and we’re superfans now.

We were so inspired by PEM at every step of the way, from digging deep into the museum’s history and philosophy to inform the brand strategy, to creating the brand campaign in close collaboration with Derek and the design, editorial and digital media teams. It was exhilarating sharing our ideas with PEM’s leadership team and curators — these are folks with world-class expertise in art, design and culture, so we knew we had to bring our A-game!

PEM is very purposeful about the way that it wants to interact with visitors. Exhibits, events and collections are curated to activate your brain, charge your senses and change your mindset. That focus on shared humanity guided our integrated team — PEM and HATCH — to insights and ideas that we’re very excited to share with the community.

Derek: One of the things we kept circling back to with HATCH was this idea of being a human‑centered organization. We're coming out of the pandemic where people have been isolated for years. We’ve got AI. We've got “fake news.” People are just craving human interaction in a way that they haven't in a very long time. Those truths created the perfect opportunity to come up with this “escape the algorithm” campaign that launched in early July.