Museum Week let anyone visit with someone else's Museum Pass for a week

The Museum Pass gives 1.4 million passholders year-round access to more than 450 museums; the association wanted as many new people as possible to experience its benefits and to lower the threshold for museum visits.

For one week museums stopped checking pass photos — borrow a passholder's card — while the ads literally mixed passholders' headshots with non-visitors'.

From April 1 to 7, 2023, museums would not check whether the visitor matched the pass photo, so anyone could use someone else's pass. The campaign showed literal mixes of headshots of passholders and non-passholders, photographed by Eva Roefs and Marit Talens, encouraging passholders to share — from colleague to boyfriend to neighbour — and non-passholders to borrow one.

The campaign opened the Museum Association's collaboration with KesselsKramer and was framed as the first step of a long-term vision to make museums accessible to everyone; no visit figures were reported.

In the run-up to Museum Week 2023, the Dutch Museum Association (Museumvereniging) and KesselsKramer launched their first joint campaign: from April 1 to 7, 2023, you could visit the museum with someone else's Museum Pass. For that week, museums would not check whether the visitor matched the photo on the pass.

The Museum Pass gives 1.4 million passholders year-round access to more than 450 museums. Martin de Rooij, the association's head of marketing and communication, called it 'the first step in our long-term vision in which we want to lower the threshold for museum visits so that everyone has the opportunity to go to the museum.'

The campaign, shot by photographers Eva Roefs and Marit Talens, shows a literal mix of headshots of Museum Passholders and non-passholders. The contrasting combinations encourage passholders to share their pass with someone who rarely visits — 'from colleague to boyfriend to neighbour' — while people without a pass are invited to borrow one from someone they know, creating an interaction about the pass's convenience and benefits. Associate creative director Maartje Slijpen: 'By literally mixing all kinds of people together, we show how the Museum Pass is interesting for a much wider group.'

The idea turns the pass's one friction — the photo check — into the campaign itself, not an obstacle around it.

Borrowing is social by design: every new visitor arrives through a passholder relationship, not an ad impression.

The headshot visuals literalise the mechanic, so the rule change and the imagery explain each other.

The stakes were small for the institutions (one week) but the trial reached exactly the non-visitors membership marketing rarely touches.

The strongest demo of a membership product is a temporary rule change: let outsiders use it once for real, and the advertising only has to point at it.

The campaign ran around National Museum Week, April 1–7, 2023, as the first collaboration between the association and KesselsKramer; later that year the agency followed with a rapid-fire 'reasons to visit' film for the same client. No attendance results from the pass-sharing week were reported.