Coastal Arts Trail – World's First Gallery-Camper
This is the story of the world’s first art gallery campervan. Vallery the art gallery-camper was built for the ultimate experience of New Zealand’s new Coastal Arts Trail.
While she technically sleeps only three at a time, she’s already reached over six million people.
HeyYou was appointed to launch New Zealand’s newest, and largest arts tourism experience by three regional development agencies; Taranaki, Whanganui, and Manawatū. The coastal Arts Trail is an epic adventure along the lower west coast of the North Island through over 50 stops, from world-class galleries to off-the-beaten-track studios and creative workshop experiences.
This trail didn’t have a big budget, but it deserved a big creative idea.
Our strategy was to create an arts roadie ‘icon’ for the Coastal Arts Trail that would separate it from all other domestic travel experiences.
This would differentiate in a cluttered market and act as a hook for both cultural seekers and media outlets.
Our idea: The World’s First Art Gallery Campervan.
We partnered with the regions, a public hire company - Quirky Campers, and an arts Curator, Aimee Ralfini, and together we converted a campervan into an art gallery with over 50 works by 26 artists to showcase the art and artists from the trail.
We called her Vallery.
And she’s no one trick pony. Vallery’s an activation, and an icon, fully leveraged through PR, events, content, and social media. Best of all, she’s a permanent asset for the Coastal Arts Trail, a moving billboard to provide many more experiences and deliver ongoing content.
What’s unique about this campaign (in addition to Vallery herself) is that we leveraged the very notion of the activation idea in PR, the process of creation in Social media, and then a ‘reveal’ series of events around the country, with more PR and social leverage. All this achieved muti-stage engagement over six months.
The launch campaign is officially complete, but Vallery will continue to activate, as a permanent asset for public hire. She’s all set to generate ongoing content with arts explorers.
Key results:
26 media hits with a combined reach of six million
149 pieces of social content, with a combined reach of over 300,000 and an average engagement rate of 20%
New user website traffic jumped 500% on the coastalartstrail.nz when Vallery was launched.
Over 1,000 entries for the ‘Win a Week in Vallery’ competition (this is strong given it required people to leave the social platform where it was promoted to enter).
The Coastal Arts Trail is the only trail in New Zealand supported by Tourism New Zealand with an official newzealand.com itinerary
The website ranked number one on Google search for ‘New Zealand Art Trail’ with no paid search support.
This campaign won Silver at the 2022 PRESSIES, a national awards program that celebrates the best PR, Experiential and Social campaigns from the past year in Aotearoa, New Zealand.
