Children’s Museum Centennial Campaign

At The Children’s Museum of Indianapolis, we focus a lot on advertising the blockbuster exhibits that come and go each year, especially those that feature popular IPs like Mickey Mouse or Barbie. However, each year we also do a brand campaign that focuses on all of the other, more permanent aspects of the museum that make it the biggest and best Children’s Museum in the world. In 2025, to properly celebrate our 100th birthday, we went above and beyond the normal effort for our brand campaign, developing a collection of vignettes built around the types of things we overhear our guests exclaim every day at the museum like, “I’ll never forget this,” and “Best. Day. Ever.”

These vignettes were developed in a way that they could be pieced together for longer form pieces, or pulled apart to create assets across formats and platforms throughout the year. This approach worked particularly well for creating ads for social media where attention spans are fleeting and videos are often seen but not heard.

Over the past couple of years, The Children’s Museum has made a concerted effort to reach out to the growing Spanish-speaking population in Indianapolis. This effort has included introducing bilingual labels in the exhibits we develop and creating Spanish versions of our ads. Often, creating a Spanish version of an ad is as simple as swapping in new VO and translating a few text elements, but since this brand campaign included on-screen speaking roles, a entirely separate set of Spanish vignettes had to be created to mirror the English ones.

All aspects of this campaign were conceptualized and executed in-house with work split between myself and my photo/video team: Ethan Gill, Ian Lane, and our intern Cora Schiavone. And Rhonda Callahan has to get some sort of special producer credit for all her efforts casting and managing the endless string of logistics required to make this production possible.