The perennial struggle is how to get people interested in events. Very often they’re planned without social media in mind, with graphics designed for physical flyers and no time to do anything more interesting than throw up a Facebook event.
But here’s something different: Blenheim Palace’s Headless Horseman.
The video itself is simple: we follow a headless horseman as he goes about his day.
This includes trotting around Blenheim Palce, visiting the shop and so on, but it’s the comedic touches which make and break a video like this.
And the Blenheim team obviously had fun with this. They have the slapstick of the headless horseman walking into a glass door, visiting an opticians and getting his hair cut. There’s an air of Trigger Happy TV to it, as the camera captues bemused old ladies and confused dogs in windows.
And this is why this is my content of the week. I’ve been known to criticise places for just constantly advertising events on social media. That’s because the workflow for advertising events is usually: someone creates a flyer for an event, the social media person gets asked to promote it, social media person then phones it in and posts the leaflet as is with a bit of inspid copy.
Posting this flyer as is would not have got over 45k likes. Instead, the Blenheim team thought ‘how can we catch people’s attention first’, played to the strengths of what they had and adapted it to how people consume content on a place like Instagram Reels. It helps that they had a willing actor and someone who obviously knows how to shoot video.
So next time you get asked to post a flyer for an event – take a second and brainstorm what you could do with the content of that event. Not every event will have a hook that works this well, but you never know unless you put the miles in.
(and thanks to Ellie Wyant from the National Gallery for flagging this video in the first place)
What else I’m thinking about
There’s been some…lively discussion on a LinkedIn post by Danny Birchall about an AI chatbot that allows you to ask questions about objects in the British Museum (unaffilliated).
There’s a lot of ‘who asked for this’ and ‘AI is killing the planet’ and ‘the ethics are atrocious’ comments on the thread.
Now, I’m definitely not an AI fanboy – particularly when it comes to generative AI. But if I ignore all of the ethics for a second (and that ‘if’ is doing a lot of heavy lifting), I found it a much more engaging way of exploring an object than an object catalogue record or an exhibition label. The ventriloquism does make me squirm though.
Anyway, have an explore and come to your own conclusions.
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