Museum of Ice Cream- Broadway - NY- 2019
Way back in 2016, a pop-up experience opened in NY’s Meatpacking District that seemed like a smart and opportunistic grab of the zeitgeist. A fun palace that tapped into people’s desire to document and share their lives via Instagram. It was an overnight sensation with tickets selling out instantly. No corporates wanted to back it or support it, no one in corporate-land got it, the art world turned up their noses at the stealing of the museum idea for such a vacuous concept, but the people came in droves.
The Museum of Ice Cream was the brainchild of Maryellis Bunn, a Parsons Graduate who had done a short stint at Time working on trends. Frustrated with people’s obsession with the online world and seeing the vast number of vacant retail sites in Manhattan, she concluded that people needed more fun things to do. Seriously fun if they were to break the inertia of the internet, the couch, and Netflix binge-watching.
So deciding what precisely that experience needed to be was the next step, and getting to ice cream was a very calculated move. Maryellis did not have a passion or a background in ice cream, nor was she especially interested in its history, but knew it was perfect because everyone could agree that it was pretty much a good thing. In an age dominated by bad news, the feel-good factor of ice-cream not only spoke of positivity but was something powerful enough to bring people together.
“Ice cream is [a] universal blessing. It’s across genders, ages, and religions.
Maryellis Burn interview in Madame Architect - October 2019
The use of the word museum- was another calculated move because she needed a descriptor to signify the type of experience people would have, something that recalled a familiar experience. The museum name is something she now regrets; still, the high-low naming is an essential part of the idea.
With a clear concept and a location, Maryellis did the build-out herself. A vital part of the success story here is the willingness to be naive and yet not fearful of the seemingly impossible. Her lack of experience and naivety turned into a strength that she used to create something unique and different.
Museum of Ice Cream- Broadway - NY- 2019
New York Magazine writing in 2017 described the San Francisco Museum as a… sprawling warren of interactive, vaguely hallucinatory confection-themed exhibits: brightly colored rooms with flattering lighting that contain, among other things, a rock-candy cave, a unicorn, and a swimming pool of rainbow sprinkles, now Instagram-influencer-infamous. It smells like fruit-flavored chemicals. There are seemingly infinite backdrops against which to take a cute selfie. It’s like a haunted house for digital natives; a Willy Wonka–induced fever dream.
Fast forward to 2020, and the Museum of Ice Cream has gone from a single pop-up in NY to pop-ups in LA and Miami, a permanent location in San Francisco, the opening last December of a permanent spot in NYC on Broadway (design by TWA) and $40m ( from VCs Elizabeth Street Ventures and Maywic Select Investments with strategic investments from venture fund OCV Partners.) of investment capital and a valuation of $200m.
Some have called the valuation ridiculous, seeing it as a symptom of an internet bubble, but once you dig a little deeper, it starts to make a bit more sense.
To date, the organization has sold over 1.5m tickets. The price of admission at the New York permanent location is $38, which is more than any art museum in the United States.
One should also consider the MOIC- does not have to buy artworks, insure them, pay for traveling exhibits from other museums, or employ a staff of art expert curators, etc. They also do not need to pay for expensive photographers- every visitor signs away their rights to their photographs when they enter the space.
Museum of Ice Cream- Ice Creams sold in Target
So they are making a nice margin on experience entry fees alone, that does not include the retail deals they have done with Target for ice-cream and teen clothing, and a makeup collection deal they have with Sephora.
Then there is brand sponsorship, a hard sell at first, but once it took off, the brands were lining up to play, and presumably, given the demand, it is not cheap. American Express is the name sponsor of the New York permanent location.
The obvious way to drive revenue is through global expansion, which the company plans to do early this year when it takes MOIC to Asia.
All these are just really the start, they have the opportunity to come up with other big concepts beyond ice cream, and because they now have the track -record, these will be easier to do.
Then there is the small matter of clients who want their own experiences. The founders of MOIC have been inundated with requests from brands that they set up their agency to do this. The agency- Figure 8 already has 35 employees and is looking for more.
Maryellis summarized the Figure 8 mission in an interview with Creativeboom
"I want to inspire people around the world with what I call experiums, emotional, and transformative moments and spaces for people to reconnect with themselves and those around them."
There is also a maturity and a business savvy to the way they approach experiences- they are both strategic and data-focused.
I’d spend hours every day just watching - whether that be by being physically present, or on-camera - not necessarily the intricacies of what they were doing, but how they were taking the space around them in and what was truly garnishing of people’s attention and their desire to interact with the design. We look at that data to develop even better spaces for people.
Interview in Madame Architect- October 2019
What is a real head-scratcher is why no ad agency has come close to bringing a concept like this to the market? This was a test and learn proposition- the Meatpacking pop-up was the test, the prototype, and the proof of concept done for a limited $ investment. The insights leveraged and the creative/design skills to make the idea both strategic and innovative are core competencies of agencies.
If there is a lesson to be learned here for agencies, it is merely a single question. What are the conditions required to realize something like MOIC?
Here are a few
Understand how cultural change creates new communication opportunities- experiment and build, lead- don’t follow.
Go beyond the TV ad- hire people with creative competency that stretches beyond scripts
Listen to all voices- ideas can come from anywhere not just the creative department-create a culture where everyone feels their opinions are valued not only those who sit in a department called Creative
Provide vehicles for these ideas to be realized- not just the token hackathon but the real funding of an idea that wins - make stuff happen- not more meetings or presentations. Make things and learn from these experiences.
Create closer ties to the VC community to gain access to finance
The failure of ad agencies to create cultures that allow their employees to go beyond client work and create things of value when the talent, the know-how, and the capacity is already in-house is criminal.
Agency heads for decades have moaned that they wanted to be paid for ideas- this is precisely what MOIC is- a commercial and creative venture with considerable value.
With an idea like MOIC, agencies have not just let a huge opportunity pass them by; they have also added a new competitor. The easy solution for a big holding company would invest in Figure 8. Still, you are paying a premium for something you should have been capable of doing yourself, and even if you buy it, nothing changes with your core businesses.
In short, the success of MOIC should serve as a reminder for agencies that their cultures, processes, and structures need a radical makeover if they want to deliver ideas of value to clients, consumers, and employees.
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Memorable Quotes
“Being cool doesn’t matter that much when climate change is coming after us.” Kim Gordon,