Mary Shelley’s House of Frankenstein
Mary Shelley’s House of Frankenstein in Bath is an attraction tells the story of Shelley’s incredible life and the creation and enduring legacy of her best-known book, Frankenstein.
The attraction opened during the pandemic. Our challenge was to launch the venue so its footfall targets could be met despite the ongoing lockdowns.
To achieve this, we created Shelley’s Home, an integrated campaign that amplified Shelley’s links to Bath, (much of Frankenstein was written while Shelley lived in the city) demonstrated how the attraction would celebrate her life, her world-famous novel and its astonishing legacy: creating the science fiction genre and launching her ‘creature’ into pop culture.
Our first goal was to build a fanbase online. Neither a horror venue or a museum, we carefully shaped the venue’s ‘look of voice’ online – bringing together facts, insights, humour and images to craft content that would appeal to ‘Franken-Fans’ individuals curious about Shelley, her life, legacy, Frankenstein, culture and Victoriana.
Our careful focus on audience and content enabled us to deliver exceptionally strong organic engagement rates that were 509% higher than industry average on Facebook and 640% higher than average on Instagram. It also enabled us to secure participation from high profile influencers across books, culture and family entertainment at no cost to the attraction.
We unveiled the attraction’s star exhibit - an 8ft animatronic true depiction of Shelley’s creature as she had described it. This secured news and features across the UK national print and broadcast media, including features in titles diverse as The Sun, Daily Mirror, Daily Mail through to The Telegraph, Financial Times, and BBC national TV and Radio.
Our paid digital display and paid search campaigns ran in tandem with the earned press activity and delivered click through rates that were 149% and 218% higher than the industry average.
As a result the attraction opened to a fanfare of interest and overcame the challenges of Covid and lockdowns to be fully booked with a waiting list to visit.