Advertising & Marketing

What we do for you

• Help galleries, museums, and art businesses clarify the difference between marketing (the message and story of who you are) and advertising (the vehicle where that message appears).
• Audit current advertising budgets to ensure dollars aren’t being wasted on efforts that don’t align with mission, vision, or audience.
• Guide them in developing powerful, consistent messaging—taglines, themes, and narratives—that can carry across all platforms.
• Teach the importance of long-range, coordinated ad campaigns versus scattered one-off ads that dilute impact.
• Show how strong marketing and advertising directly influence brand strength, sales, and collector engagement.

What engagement looks like

• Collaborative Support: Whether working with your in-house team or outside creatives, we guide you through integrating message and medium so your ads deliver real results.
• In-Depth Conversations: We sit down with you to review your advertising budget, your marketing story, and your client targets.
• Audits & Strategy Sessions: We analyze your current campaigns and platforms—print, digital, social media, PR—and identify gaps or redundancies.
• Customized Recommendations: We help shape your messaging so that it reflects your vision and connects to your audience in every medium.
• Campaign Design: Together, we build a long-range campaign approach that captures client attention, nurtures loyalty, and increases profitability.

Know Your Client

“Knowing thy client inside and out must be specifically” profiled.  If you have never done this, you are missing out.  Barnett adds that the landscape of “marketing” and advertisement is usually in flux.  Demographics can change as can the advertising media itself.  Over the many years of being a creative director for one of the nation’s most unusual galleries, marketing was always the juice that kept him going.  Do take some time and look at some of the campaigns that Barnett initiated.  Exhibitions just using wording like “new works” or “holiday exhibition and group show” are becoming outdated as advertisements.  For a real call to action, a perfect example are new movie and book titles.  Great titles ground your exhibition in intrigue and again can affect sales. 

Ivan would love to sit down with you and map out and enter exhibition/events season.  However, if you have not drilled down and codified specifically who your ideal client is, then you have work to do.  Finding your sliver of the marketplace is fundamental, not unlike auto brands. There is a specific consumer for specific brands.  For example, are you a Ferrari,  Porsche, Jaguar, or a Bentley. 

The future financial growth of your business is dependent on your messaging.  Barnett suggests a deep audit of your advertising and marketing budgets to really dissect your past, present and future strategies.  The above also has to do with “re-branding.” This discussion comes into play when tackling your advertising and marketing plans.  When a product is “repackaged,” it is a monumental task, with one foot in your old brand and one foot in your new direction.  For long established businesses, this may be necessary.