Title	THE ROYAL ACADEMY OF ARTS ONLINE EXHIBITION
Brand	THE ROYAL ACADEMY OF ARTS
Product/Service	THE ROYAL ACADEMY OF ARTS
Category	G08. Market Disruption
Entrant	WETRANSFER Amsterdam, THE NETHERLANDS
Idea Creation	WETRANSFER Amsterdam, THE NETHERLANDS
Production	WETRANSFER Amsterdam, THE NETHERLANDS

Name	Company	Position
Holly Fraser	WePresent	Editor In Chief
Danielle Boelling	WePresent	Managing Editor
Suzanne Tromp	WeTransfer	Project Lead / Commissioning Editor
Annematt Ruseler	WeTransfer	Director Of Communications
Marika Seo	WeTransfer	Lead Designer
Diana Alcausin	WeTransfer	Creative Director
Jason Bradley	WeTransfer	Developer
Joe Mier	WeTransfer	Producer
Lumir Spanihel	WeTransfer	Lead Designer
Floris van Driel	WeTransfer	Art Director
Ferren Gipson	WeTransfer	Writer
James Drummond	Uncommon Creative Studio	Managing Partner
Emma Nabridnyj	Uncommon Creative Studio	Head of PR

Why is this work relevant for Brand Experience & Activation?

We collaborated with the Royal Academy of Arts as it’s exclusive digital partner for its annual Summer Exhibition. Allowing millions around the world to experience the Royal Academy’s Summer Exhibition online viewing the 1,172 artworks in a new digitised format. Our wallpaper displays all of the artworks through an innovative “Lucky Dip” format, which implements a dynamic grid to reflect the actual walls of the Royal Academy and the diversity of the Summer Exhibition. With every click, new artwork is revealed and the wallpaper automatically adjusts its dimensions to match the piece, bringing the vibrancy of the exhibition to life.

Background

• Situation: In 2020, The Royal Academy of Arts Summer Exhibition, which had even continued throughout two World Wars, would be held for the 252nd time. This year was the first time the exhibition was forced to partially close its doors due to the pandemic. • Brief: Find a way to reach new audiences for the Summer Exhibition, so people would still be able to experience the brilliant artworks. • Objectives: To align with the values of the Summer Exhibition – specifically to make art accessible to a large audience. Through its unique submission and curation process, the exhibition historically shows emerging and established artists alongside one another, The goal was to show the works in a new way, displaying them in the same democratic sense, so the public could still experience the exhibition worldwide, even when the physical doors of the RA were closed during lockdown.

Describe the creative idea (20% of vote)

Our internal creative studio designed a full screen interactive digital experience on our digital platform using a responsive grid that mimicked the walls of a curated gallery space, while fully integrating RA’s Summer Exhibition identity. The experience was designed in such a way that with every click a new piece of art would appear, encouraging the user to explore more. Our editorial platform created an accompanying article with audio snippets and quotes from the exhibition curators, acting as a guided tour to the online exhibition.

Describe the strategy (20% of vote)

A digital interactive experience where users could browse through the 1,172 artworks from the exhibition on wetransfer.com (wallpaper), showcased 22 Million times to its worldwide audience. It clicked through to an article on WePresent where readers could get an insight into the curation process of the RA’s jury, designed as a guided audio tour where the jurors spoke about their ways of working and highlighted specific pieces in the exhibition.

Describe the execution (30% of vote)

Our internal creative studio designed this digital experience, using a responsive grid mimicking the walls of a curated gallery space, while fully integrating RA’s Summer Exhibition identity. The experience was designed in such a way that with every click a new piece of art would appear, making the user want to explore more. To showcase the 1172 artworks from Royal Academy, we developed a pipeline, built in Node JS, which collected 2 gigabytes of data, such as the artwork, dimensions, file size, artist and medium. The data was processed and stored in separate AWS S3 buckets. To make sure we showcased each artwork randomly, we opted to use Simplex Noise for the randomness instead of the default math random. Design phase: 7-18 Sept Development: 21-25 Sept Feedback on preview link due from RA: 25 Sept Dev feedback/v2: 28-30 Sept Final preview link: Friday 2 Oct Launch: Tues Oct 6

List the results (30% of vote)

Placement WeTransfer wallpapers and WePresent article • Scale Showcased 23 Million times The unique collaboration marked the first digital partnership of its kind for both parties and broke all records for the Summer Exhibition’s audience to date. In the first four weeks of the campaign, 22,794,238 WeTransfer users saw the WeTransfer x Royal Academy wallpaper on the website. 119,359 entered the experience (and thus visited the online exhibition) and saw at least one artwork from the exhibition. 32% of all people who entered the experience clicked to see 2 artworks or more (38,477). Those who clicked through after seeing 2 artworks, tended to stick around: 15% saw at least 5 artworks or more (18,255 people) 10,938 people saw 9 artworks or more. 4,472 people stayed and clicked to see more than 20 artworks. 2,708 people saw more than 50 artworks.

Please tell us how disruption in your market inspired the work

In 2020, The Royal Academy of Arts Summer Exhibition, which had even continued throughout two World Wars, would be held for the 252nd time. This year was the first time the exhibition was forced to partially close its doors due to the pandemic. Hence the Covid 19 pandemic disrupting galleries and museums all over the world led to us becoming collaborators with the Royal Academy of Arts as it’s exclusive digital partner and creating the The Royal Academy Of Arts Online Exhibition. Allowing people across the world to view the Summer Exhibition from the comfort of their own homes through lockdown.