Project brief: The Auckland Museum holds the world’s largest Maori and Pacific collection and is a natural history as well as a war memorial museum. LATE is part of a broad program to reposition and reconnect the Museum with its external audiences, particularly the hard-to-reach 20–40-year-old group.

Approach: The opportunity to experience a cocktail of debate, music and community is rare among Auckland entertainment offerings. The idea was to build an identity aligned to the AM campaign identity as well as the concept of LATE, utilizing the metaphor of neon. Each letter of the word LATE was built as a stand-alone neon mounted in a Perspex cube. The letters serve as an event identity through posters, online and physically at the event as stage signage.

Effectiveness: The LATE at the Museum program has had a huge impact on audience development. Up to 1,000 people attend every last Thursday night each month, attracted by the contemporary content of music, fashion and debate. The LATE event has successfully repositioned the Museum as a social hub for a younger adult audience. The neons have proved not only to symbolize the LATEs themselves but also to stand alone as an exhibit in their own right. They have become the center of advertising campaigns for the LATE series, the major part of the LATE event set design and the backdrop to bands and other entertainment. They are recognized as a symbol of LATEs and an active demonstration of the Museum’s outreach to an untapped audience. From a cost perspective, the idea of investing in an object and rethinking it for different promotional purposes has saved considerable cost for the client.