One exhibition, four channels,
and a sold-out launch month
Who
Antikenmuseum Basel is
Antikenmuseum Basel is Switzerland's only museum devoted exclusively to ancient art and Mediterranean antiquity. Its visitor base has historically skewed toward its core, older Swiss and Southern German audience.
Hero Games, an interactive exhibition built around seven mythical missions for families with children aged 8 to 14, asked the museum to reach a meaningfully younger and more family-oriented audience without losing that core base.
The exhibition ran on its own microsite, kept separate from the museum's main site. comtogether set up the measurement on it, so every campaign click was attributable from the first day rather than reconstructed later.
Fill an exhibition
with a new audience
The brief was to sell tickets at volume, tens of thousands over a six-month run, to an audience the museum does not reach on its own: families with children aged 8 to 14 as the primary target, adults under 40 as secondary, and cross-border visitors from Southern Germany.
There was no existing digital audience to retarget on day one, and the exhibition window was fixed (14 September 2025 to 30 March 2026). The campaign had to build awareness and convert inside a hard deadline, with no second season to learn into.
A full funnel,
run in two waves
This was never one blended budget. Each channel owned a different stage of the funnel: DOOH and TikTok built reach at the top, Meta primed intent through the middle, and Google Search captured it at the bottom.
And instead of spreading effort evenly across six months, comtogether concentrated social and DOOH into two focused waves timed to the school holidays, with Search always-on underneath. Wave 1 built a cold audience from zero. Wave 2 re-engaged the audience Wave 1 had already primed.
No existing digital audience to lean on. Cold prospecting on TikTok and Meta established first reach and seeded a remarketing pool, while DOOH put the exhibition on the streets during the autumn break.
With social and DOOH dark, Search ran on its own against a much smaller impression pool. Click-through roughly doubled, which confirmed the demand was real rather than manufactured by pressure elsewhere in the mix.
The pool built in Wave 1 came back warm. Meta converted 31% better on fewer impressions, TikTok leaned on remarketing, and a third DOOH burst in February reinforced the message into the winter holidays.
Put the exhibition on the streets during each wave, weighted to the Old Town (46% of impressions), train stations and cross-border commuter routes (26%) and family venues (19%), reaching families in the city exactly when the digital ads were live.
Deliver the widest, youngest reach of the mix, four fifths of it aimed at 18 to 34s, and seed a remarketing pool for Wave 2. A pure awareness play: reach first, conversions later.
Prime the audience and re-engage it across the two waves, then hand warm intent down to Search. Aimed squarely at parents: women aged 35 to 44 produced 41% of all booking-intent signals, the exact profile the exhibition needed.
Run always-on and catch the intent the other channels created. Proof it worked: in the November interwave, with no social or DOOH competing, click-through roughly doubled against the campaign-long average, the cleanest read on genuine intent in the whole run.
Two waves,
four channels,
one calendar
Measurement set up on the exhibition's own microsite, separate from Antikenmuseum's main site, with the pixel and event tracking comtogether managed end to end. Booking intent was tracked as its own event, not inferred from page views.
Two synchronised waves across Google Search, Meta and TikTok, timed to the autumn and Christmas school holidays rather than spread evenly, because every channel peaked during those windows.
A DOOH layer in Basel across three bursts, weighted to the Old Town, the station and cross-border commuter routes, and family venues, landing alongside each digital wave. All three delivered at full campaign progression across 1,340 screens.
A campaign structure split by market and language, with brand and generic search separated. German-language campaigns carried the volume; the French-language gap outside Search was flagged as the clearest opportunity for the next exhibition.
Sold-out weekends,
from a standing start
Every channel did the job it was given. Search converted, Meta primed and re-engaged the audience, TikTok delivered the widest reach of the mix, and DOOH amplified it physically in the city. Figures verified against each platform's own reporting for September 2025 to March 2026, with the visitor count reported by the museum.
What this
case proves
A museum with no digital audience to inherit filled an exhibition inside a fixed window, because the channels were given different jobs instead of the same one. Search was never asked to build demand and DOOH was never asked to convert.
The two-wave shape is the transferable part. Wave 1 paid for Wave 2 by leaving behind an audience, which is why Meta converted 31% better on fewer impressions the second time around. A flat six-month spread would have produced neither the peak nor the pool.
“With the agency's expert knowledge and a highly motivated team, we felt well supported at all times. We are very satisfied with the results. The campaigns attracted a lot of attention and we received positive feedback on our advertising strategy.”
