In a world so culturally diverse, racism has never been so uncalled for, yet it continues to be a massive issue around the world.
A museum in Paris recently decided that enough is enough and, in incredibly creative fashion, used experiential marketing to denounce racism in the run up to the French election.
The Musée de l’homme, an anthropology museum, created its first ever year-long exhibition named ‘Us and Them: from prejudice to racism’.
It placed a unique photo booth in the middle of the museum, and invited passers-by to take a picture with someone else.
Via embedded advanced technology, the photo booth was able to detect the exact shade of each person’s skin tone. The two colours were then used in a series of posters, specially created by international artist Noma Bar – providing each partaker with something exclusive to take away from the stunt.
The result was a series of individual pieces of art that highlighted the message that the uniqueness of our skin tones is something we all have in common, rather than something that separates us. A selection of the posters were then printed and placed on billboards around the city’s Metro stations.
The campaign was also launched on an app that created posters ideal for social sharing. Users could upload a picture of themselves with a friend, and in return receive back something highly personal and evocative; the perfect combination to spread a hugely important message.
Time and time again we are seeing experiential marketing’s ability to bring people together. This latest campaign from Musée de l’homme is a perfect example of this.
Giving participants something tangible to take away and ponder elongated the experience and added to its overall impact.
This isn’t the first experiential campaign that has used a photo booth in a bid to raise awareness of an important message. In fact, Berlin women’s rights group Terre Des Femmes recently took a similar approach to shine light on shocking domestic violence statistics.