Since 2016, the Vancouver Mural Festival (VMF) has produced over 250 murals featuring local artists. It’s known as a fun celebration for a few weeks in the summer, where tens of thousands of people from all across the Lower Mainland come to the Mount Pleasant community. Since their murals are up 365 days of the year, VMF wanted to be known as more than simply a 3-week festival. They wanted to be known as a year-round art district—not just in the eyes of citizens of the Lower Mainland, but by government-run tourism boards as well.

To help Mount Pleasant gain prominence as a year-round mural district, they focussed on what made their art so different compared to the art you could see anywhere else in Western Canada. In fact, the murals are so artistically weird, distinct and untraditionally unique that they’re pretty hard to explain. So for their campaign, One Twenty Three West took a crack at explaining them literally, then invited people to come down and see it for themselves.

The campaign included billboards, OOH posters and Instagram Stories that ran across the city. And during the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, when galleries and museums were limited in their capacity, they took it as an opportunity to promote the outdoor nature of the Mural District and the fact that you could easily physically distance yourself.

Each ad featured a headline, attempting to describe one of the artistically unique and somewhat weird murals. They also acted as wayfinders with a map to the location of that specific mural. This not only helped create intrigue for the art in the Mount Pleasant district, but also created a city-wide search—inviting people to come down to Mount Pleasant Mural District to see each mural for themselves.

They also used the colour palette from each corresponding mural in the design of the ads so that the colour scheme of each poster, billboard and Instagram Story tied back to the mural it was describing. Each ad was thoughtfully minimal and simple, so the ads didn’t look overly designed, allowing the headlines to speak for the murals themselves.

At a time when many other arts organizations were going under because of the economic impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Vancouver Mural Festival not only survived, but actually came out in a better financial position than they were going in. The campaign helped VMF gain sponsorship deals with Business Improvement Associations across the city, and even kickstarted a collaboration on a mandate with the City of Vancouver to allow murals to be painted on ground-level construction hoarding.

Additionally, the prominence of the campaign helped VMF gain government funding to create a mobile app. The app allows users to discover and learn about all the 250+ murals throughout Mount Pleasant’s Mural District. Users can read about the meaning and inspiration for each mural, learn about the artists and their backgrounds, discover curated collections, and explore an interactive map with the location of every single mural—any time of the year.

Not only did the campaign help the Mount Pleasant community become known as a year-round Mural District, it also helped kickstart a Winter Arts Festival that will now be an ongoing event for the Mural District every year. The awareness created by the campaign helped VMF win the BC Heritage Award in Education, Communication and Awareness, as well as set up VMF in a position to produce over 60 more murals in 2021.