The Powerhouse
How a museum leveraged Twitter to drive important conversations and awareness around climate change
Banner Image: Boiler Hall, Powerhouse Ultimo
Photographer: Kat Lu
The Powerhouse museum (@MAASmuseum), (“MAAS”) is Australia’s contemporary museum for excellence and innovation in applied arts and sciences. Their venues include Powerhouse Ultimo, Sydney Observatory, and Museums Discovery Center.
Campaign objective
The Powerhouse Museum (@MAASmuseum) launched 100 Climate Conversations, one of Australia’s most ambitious climate-focused cultural project, with 100 of the nation’s leading climate innovators. On the day of launch they wanted to raise awareness and conversations, leading to increased bookings for live discussions and increased downloads of the conversations.
Based on Twitter Internal Data, there were 1.7 million climate change conversations in Australia in 2021 on Twitter.1 The conversations about climate change happening on Twitter are passionate, impactful, and happening in real-time – this is why MAAS decided to join in.
@MAASmuseum’s campaign objectives were mass awareness, engagement, and message association. To achieve this, they decided to go big, with a Twitter Takeover. This put their ads where the conversations start on Twitter, the Explore tab, for maximum impact across 24 hours.
@MAASmuseum also used the hashtag #Powerhouse100 during the campaign to highlight the #100ClimateConversations exhibition. This helped drive more Tweets and created a trending topic related to their campaign.
Audience
@MAASmuseum’s target audience is broad – any demographic interested in applied arts and sciences. Of this demographic, those with a particular interest in climate change were the target audience for the campaign.
Products used
Results
The campaign hashtag, #Powerhouse100, was trending at #2 in Australia from 17-18 March 20222
organic impressions with #Powerhouse1003
Trend Takeover impressions4
Keys to success
Design for engagement
Creatives are one of the most important aspects of any ad’s success. A study by Kantar Millward Brown found that 97% of people focus on the visuals on Twitter5, so it’s a good idea to include visuals in your Tweets as much as possible.
@MAASmuseum used impactful visuals in their Tweets, like this eye-catching black and white image of the names of the 100 speakers at the Powerhouse Museum exhibition.
Cultural relevance is key
Twitter is where brands build cultural relevance and connect with their target audience. Research we conducted with Kantar found a 73% correlation between a brand’s cultural relevance and its revenue.6 This reinforces the value of plugging your brand into the conversation during key cultural moments on Twitter.
Building cultural relevance also helps brands to connect to the communities on Twitter, creating a shared sense of purpose between your brand and your followers.
The Trend Takeover description that @MAASmuseum used took all of this into careful consideration – ‘Important Australian climate conversations’, which has high cultural relevance to the #auspol (Australian politics) community.
Launch something new
Whether you’re launching a new brand, product, app, message, or promotion, Twitter is the perfect place to take it because it’s the home of real-time updates and conversations. Brands that meet their launch KPIs are 2.3X more likely to launch on Twitter.7
The Powerhouse Museum used Twitter to trend their hashtag on the day of the 100 Conversations exhibition launch, resulting in #Powerhouse100 being the #2 trending hashtag in Australia on the launch day.
This was our first time investing in a Twitter Trend Takeover, and it has exceeded our original expectations in terms of reach and engagement.
1. Source: Twitter Internal Data, Australia, 01/01/2021 - 31/12/21
2. Source: Twitter Internal Data, Australia, 17 Mar -18 Mar 2022
3. Source: Twitter Internal Data, Australia, 17 Mar -18 Mar 2022
4. Source: Twitter Internal Data, Australia, 17 Mar -18 Mar 2022
5. Source: “Why Twitter” Competitive Research, Kantar Millward Brown, 2017.
6. Source: Kantar & Twitter Brand Cultural Relevance Research, commissioned by Twitter, US, Nationally representative sample, 100 US brands tested, Dec 2019. Methodology: Twitter ran a correlation analysis to look at the relationship between the relative movement of spend on Twitter and cultural relevance (as scored by our survey). The model included the 100 brands tested. The output of that model was the correlation coefficient (which is a measure of strength of the relationship between the two sets of variables) of .73 (or 73%) and .88 (or 88%), respectively. The possible value ranges for a correlation coefficient are between -1.0 and 1.0.
7. Source: Nielsen Brand Effect (US/UK/JP/CA), Q3 2015 - Q3 2018 Launch campaigns, n= 340 studies. Percentages refer to % uplifts (not deltas or percentage point difference) | Bain & Company, 2019 Launch Marketer Survey, US, n=650.
Ready to advertise on Twitter?
