21C Museum Hotels: Hotel Marketing Case Study

THE SETUP

A new hotel in a city with two hundred of them

21c Museum Hotels is a contemporary art museum with a hospitable side, built out of Louisville. Chicago was their ninth property and their newest.

Chicago also has a world-class art scene and nearly 200 hotels. A new opening there does not get noticed on merit alone.

Awareness was the harder problem underneath. Discovery told us that the further a market sat from the Louisville flagship, the less anyone knew the brand. In Chicago, most of the target audience had never heard of 21c at all.

The property was also still under construction, with details being finalized. So the campaign had to build anticipation for something we could not yet fully show.

The campaign won three Indigo Design Awards.

THE SOLUTION

C U SOON, CHICAGO

The concept was our own take on contemporary art. We deconstructed 21c’s parent brand elements, including the logo and their penguin mascot, and used strong campaign messaging to make an unfamiliar brand feel familiar before anyone could walk inside.

Working with a partially built hotel turned out to be an advantage. Curiosity was the point, so a graphic approach that withheld detail did more than photography of finished rooms would have.

Campaign highlights include:

The C U SOON, CHICAGO platform, built on deconstructed 21c brand elements
A two-phase reveal moving from intrigue into the opening announcement
Motion-forward creative built for mobile feeds on Instagram and Facebook
A dedicated landing page with a countdown clock to opening day
Window displays on the property exterior
Digital out-of-home bus shelter placements
Targeting across Chicago and regional drive markets

THE STRATEGY

Withhold the details on purpose

Phase one teased what was coming without explaining it. Phase two announced the opening and leaned into the museum-meets-hotel idea directly. Each phase revealed a little more, adding the contemporary art museum, the spa-like rooms, and the chef-forward restaurant as the date got closer.

The audience shaped the medium. Artistically minded and socially fluent people scroll fast and skip anything that looks like a hotel ad, so elegant animation built for mobile specs was the only thing likely to stop them.

The out-of-home work brought the same graphic treatment to the sidewalk. Window displays on the building and bus shelter placements captured foot traffic and made the construction site itself part of the campaign.

Everything drove to one landing page with the countdown clock, so the momentum built in social had somewhere to accumulate.

THE RESULTS

Three Indigo Design Awards

21c Museum Hotel Chicago opened its doors on February 4, 2020, and the campaign that introduced it was recognized at the Indigo Design Awards that April.

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Indigo Design Awards

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Campaign phases from teaser to opening

What changed:

A brand with almost no Chicago awareness arrived with recognition already built
The graphic approach turned an unfinished property into an asset rather than a limitation
The campaign work was recognized by the Indigo Design Awards, judged on design merit rather than media performance