National Naval Aviation Museum Campaign

The Direct Effect™ Innovation Challenge is a nationwide competition between teams of college students. The goal is to design and develop integrated marketing campaigns in response to real-life business cases. The mission is to develop integrated marketing campaigns. These campaigns needed to include designing and prototyping a direct mail piece to increase the audience and business to the National Naval Aviation Museum in Florida. Winning teams have the opportunity to work with industry partners to bring their concepts to life.

This campaign concept reached the final round of the competition and was presented by the team to the judges.

The Process

This campaign primarily focuses on targeting young generation Z users who have an interest in the history and mechanics of aircraft. With that said, we acknowledge the state of the world post pandemic, and how much of the youth prefers to be indoors on their phone then outdoors without good reason. The secondary target audience are families traveling on vacation to Florida. To get the most out of each channel we broke our campaign into three progressive stages of before, during, and after. The intention of this campaign is the increase youth engagement and museum visitations.

The first channel Would be direct mail to the museum's mailing list. This postcard would not only be a spectacle for current museum members to receive but also give an opportunity for them to show their younger generation family members. The postcard could highlight all the museum's most well-known artifacts as well as include a QR code on the back of the card that could be scanned with any smartphone. Once activated this QR code will generate a small AR (Augmented Reality) aircraft that would fly around the postcard. This would also allow for a landing page to be revealed on top of the postcard AR overlay, allowing for the user to do one of two things; either book a visit to the museum, or see a sneak peek VR (virtual Reality flight simulator. The VR would most likely be a 3-d video of inside an active cockpit during a flight show. Once the user completed the flight stimulation, they would get a pop up that they have “earned their wings” that can be redeemed for a discount on the actual museum flight simulator.

We also considered our second channel to be out of home, in airports that are in or going to Florida and air shows. These areas would be perfect to input a simple kiosk with a large screen that would catch passer by and younger children's attention. The screen would display different aircraft, birds, flying things etc... and ask users to take a picture when they see a specific aircraft or pilot wings to receive a gift upon arrival. This gift could be a sticker of pilot wings they receive upon arrival.

The third channel focuses on growing the museum's reach and engaging with the younger generation. When a younger user is on site, once they enter the museum and receive a map with a QR code with a CTA like “It is time to hunt for wings” the QR code would open a AR overla y of the museum map with 5-7 hotspots to go to. When a user goes to a spot, there is a photo/ selfie spot with a QR code that prompts them to share their photo with a Hashtag like #NavalAviationMuseumMapOnce a user goes to all of the spots they would be able to receive their wings sticker, discount or other incentive.