Mystic Seaport: Lobster Days

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Insights

Mystic Seaport Museum prides itself as being the nation’s leading maritime museum. While tens of thousands of families visit each year, Mystic Seaport also wanted to drive attendance to their many special events to increase repeat visits during the year, as well as membership sales.

We decided to start by positioning Mystic Seaport’s Lobster Days as a can’t-miss event — and the perfect way to kick off the summer.

Ideas

We broke through all the summer event promotional clutter with bold, impossible-to-miss creative that had lots of fun with the lobster theme while also promoting “side dishes,” like cruising aboard a 1908 steamboat, listening to music of the sea, exploring nautical exhibits and all the other activities that Mystic Seaport offers. Our campaign gave Lobster Days a playful, vibrant personality as fun as the event itself.

Impact

While Lobster Days has been a tradition for close to three decades, the combination of fresh creative and a refreshed media plan has helped Mystic Seaport continue to raise funds for the Mystic Rotary Club. By leveraging promotional materials as well as earned and paid media, the Lobster Days campaign contributed in driving increased attendance while other destinations decreased. It also increased Web traffic (80% unique visitors each month) and Facebook followers (grew 30+% each summer season) while maintaining Mystic Seaport’s unaided and aided awareness as one of Connecticut’s top five tourism destinations.