Nitty gritty

Promoting the launch of a major Warhol retrospective at Tate Modern with a playful digital platform seemed a clear strategy for representing an artist who loved to make work that was on the cutting edge of media, and plenty playful. 

We invited users to submit pictures “of artistic merit” with a chance that they would be turned into Warhol-esc image galleries – those who made the cut had their galleries collated on the Tate site, selected at random and displayed on the front page of the Tate site for 15 minutes fame.

It all seemed seamless, but behind the scenes we were massaging the selection to increase its currency. If ten submissions rolled in from IBM, for example, we would make sure we picked one of them to fuel excitement and value around their inclusion – gamification, except that it was 2002 and fortunately no one was using the word ‘gamification’ in 2002.

Highlights

• Top 2002-slebs Lorraine Kelly, Dave the Rave and Dave Wright asking to be Warholised and then sharing it with their millions of listeners.
  
• Watching the new(ish) blogging community really power up enormous free-media impressions, which in turn lead to traditional media pick up.
  
• The moment when we got an image submitted with a begging letter for us to give the author the email contact of submission #335 because he wanted to ask her out. (We respectfully declined to provide it).
  
• Getting the Warholising knack and processing a picture in two minutes by hand.