Objectives
The marketing agency of The Hague & Partners had the following objectives with the Big5 campaign:
- To firmly position The Hague as a cultural city.
- To increase awareness of The Hague as a cultural destination under the message “Five Masters, One City”.
- To highlight The Hague’s unique cultural offering: the city where you can experience works by the five most internationally renowned Dutch artists.
- To contribute, through a multi-year approach, to the long-term ambition of putting The Hague on the map as a cultural city.
- To rejuvenate the cultural target audience and become more attractive to new generations of visitors.
- To generate greater impact through collaboration, achieving broad reach and visibility among both Dutch and international tourists.
The digital campaign had three main objectives:
- Build The Hague as a cultural destination
To position The Hague as the city where you can experience five iconic masters up close: Escher, Mesdag, Mondrian, Rembrandt and Vermeer. - Drive engagement and traffic to the landing pages
To generate traffic to the campaign pages for The Hague museums using dynamic, location-based and audience-targeted creatives. - Measure and maximise physical museum visits
To use geofencing and footfall data to gain insight into actual visits generated per museum and per audience segment (national vs. international).
Our approach
To effectively reach both national tourists and international museum visitors, mJourney deployed a data-driven, omnichannel Footfall campaign between 13 October and 20 November 2025.
- National tourists – Display, DOOH & DOOH Sync
- Location-based targeting in easily accessible cities within approx. 60 km of The Hague (including Rotterdam, Leiden, Delft, Dordrecht, Haarlem, Gouda, Scheveningen), complemented by culturally strong cities further away (such as Amsterdam, Utrecht, Breda, Nijmegen, ’s‑Hertogenbosch, Arnhem, Eindhoven, Maastricht).
- Dynamic DOOH creatives at high-traffic locations, encouraging museum visits in The Hague.
- Mobile display + DOOH sync:
- Targeting the cultural segments “cultural omnivore” and “emerging culture explorer”.
- Automatic language selection (Dutch messaging for Dutch tourists).
- Retargeting people who had been exposed to DOOH screens, reinforcing the message and driving high-quality traffic to the landing pages.
- Geofencing and footfall measurement around participating museums to attribute visitor flows to the campaign.
- International tourists – Mobile display & DOOH sync
- In-destination targeting of tourists in Amsterdam, Rotterdam and The Hague, with radius targeting around key museums, tourist hotspots and busy city districts (e.g. Dam Square, Museumplein, Jordaan, Markthal, Depot Boijmans, Binnenhof, De Pier).
- Language and audience selection:
- Focus on non-Dutch language settings and cultural travellers.
- Campaign messaging fully in English.
- DOOH–mobile syncing:
- International visitors exposed to DOOH creatives were subsequently retargeted on mobile to move them from inspiration to an actual museum visit.
- Footfall measurement per museum, providing clarity on which creatives, locations and cities contributed most to physical visits.
- London – commuters & culture travellers (UK flight)
- Layered DOOH strategy in London:
- Layer 1: high-traffic districts and major stations with high contact frequency.
- Layer 2: affluent, culture‑ and travel‑oriented areas (based on app and browsing behaviour), with deliberate exclusion of overlap with Layer 1.
- In‑market audience targeting:
- Segments such as “city trips”, “travel to the Netherlands” and “culture lovers”.
- Synced display with DOOH:
- Focus on commuters who work in the city centre and live in the suburbs.
- DOOH exposure in the city, followed by mobile display in their home area.
- KPI focus:
- Primary: CTR (interest and research behaviour).
- Footfall tracked as a secondary, supporting KPI.
Optimization strategy
The Big5 campaign was continuously optimised based on real-time data:
Phase-based approach:
- Phase 1: broader focus on brand and destination awareness.
- Phase 2: sharpened focus on driving actual museum visits, based on the best-performing cities, creatives and audiences from Phase 1.
Budget shifts towards best-performing elements:
- More budget allocated to cities and tactics with the highest visit ratio (for example, The Hague and Rotterdam for international tourists).
- Downsizing of tactics with low footfall, such as an overly broad Amsterdam focus for footfall-driven objectives.
Creatives & formats:
- Emphasis on top-performing formats such as 300×250 and 300×600, which delivered the highest engagement and visit rates.
- Focus on the best-performing master creatives (e.g. Escher, Rembrandt, Mondrian).
Publisher and domain optimisation:
- Underperforming domains excluded based on both CTR and visit rate.
- Additional deals negotiated with high-quality publishers to keep volume and quality in balance.
Continued testing (UK):
- Testing various in‑market segments (e.g. “travel to Europe” versus “travel to Amsterdam”) and geos within London, while retaining the best‑performing audiences for a subsequent flight.
Results
National tourists (NL) – Display
- Impressions: 1,086,941 (higher than planned)
- Clicks: 2,747
- CTR: 0.25% (above benchmark of 0.15%)
- Visits (footfall): 10,635* (vs. 3,696–4,086 planned)
International tourists – Display
- Impressions: 392,377
- Clicks: 1,631
- CTR: 0.41% (well above benchmark)
- Visits (footfall): 3,122* (vs. 2,880–3,184 planned)
*Including a 15‑day attribution window. The visit KPI for national tourists was significantly exceeded.
London – commuters (UK flight)
- Impressions: 568,417
- Clicks: 6,339
- CTR: 1.12% (well above the 0.5% benchmark)
- Measured museum visits from London: 4, primarily to Escher and Mondrian.
Museum-level highlights
- Escher in Het Paleis
- Highest CTR among the UK audience (approx. 1.8%) and 3 out of 4 UK visits.
- Strong visit rates among national visitors.
- Kunstmuseum Den Haag
- Highest national visit score and a solid visit rate among both Dutch and international visitors.
- Mauritshuis & Museum Panorama Mesdag
- Average to high engagement rates, both nationally and internationally.
- A key insight from the evaluation: for Mauritshuis, overlapping geofences with the Binnenhof should be avoided in future.
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