How ACMI appeals to everyone

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In one of ACMI's cinemas, you can sit through an eight-hour film by the Filipino director Lav Diaz. A few rooms away, toddlers wobble through a free Bluey exhibition while their parents look for somewhere to park the pram. Walk on and you reach a wall of arcade games with teenagers crowded around them.

One brand attracts and retains all those audiences, in the same week.

Most marketers struggle to hold the attention of one audience. ACMI, the Melbourne institution that calls itself the Australian museum of screen culture, holds cinephiles, gamers, families and traditional art-goers at once, and keeps them all coming back. It is funded directly by the government, so their brief is genuinely to appeal to everyone.

"Who is this for?" is the first question in any good brand strategy, and ACMI's honest answer is basically everyone. "Who doesn't love screen culture? There's something for everyone. It's the one thing that genuinely cuts across every demographic" Hilary said. From a teenager playing video games to a cinephile watching Tarkovsky, the pull of the screen is almost universal.

That reach is also the risk. I’m sure you’ve already heard some version of “trying to be for everyone means you’re for no one”, I’ve definitely said it a few times myself. The obvious way to cope is to become a slightly different brand for each crowd, changing the voice and personality to match whoever you’re focusing on right now.

ACMI does the opposite. "We're not shape-shifting" Hilary said. "We're not trying to change the way we talk and our tone of voice".

The brand personality stays put. ACMI describes it as bold, playful and smart, the language stays conversational, and the descriptions in every exhibition are written so a 12 year old can follow, whether the subject is a children's show or an artist retrospective.

There is a hard-won reason for that discipline. Chasing a subculture's aesthetic is a losing game. "The minute you try to do that, you've already lost" Hilary said. "You'll always be a step behind and the audience notice that straight away". A brand that tries to sound like gamers to gamers gets the details slightly wrong and loses the room. Staying yourself reads as more credible than trying to be something you’re not.

What lets the brand stay this still and still reach everyone is the universal appeal of screen culture. ACMI calls it "the most democratic art form", the one you don’t need an art degree to enjoy. Almost every exhibition pulls back the curtain on how the work was made, because the fascination of craft is something everyone shares. "Someone might not be a gamer" Hilary said, "but they can still love a gaming animator breaking down how they hand drew the work." The subject is niche, but the wonder is universal.

That breadth creates a harder problem than tone of voice, and one that took ACMI longer to face. The museum runs on exhibitions, and each one builds its own audience almost from scratch. The 2025 video games show is the clearest case. ACMI had close to no gaming audience when it started, so the team went to where gamers already were, at events like Supanova and game expos, across Twitch and TikTok, through creator partnerships and player nights that gave the community somewhere to gather. The mailing list grew from zero to roughly 15,000 contacts.

Then that exhibition ends. Historically, the next exhibition would chase an entirely different crowd, and the gaming audience ACMI worked so hard to assemble would quietly disperse. Build them up, then drop them.

That is the pattern ACMI is now trying to break. "We don't want to be dropping that audience" Hilary said. So the museum hosts Melbourne’s annual Games Week to keep that community engaged between the big shows. It treats a handful of core verticals, video games and family audiences among them, as standing commitments rather than one-off campaigns.

The sequencing is very deliberate too. Before the Bluey exhibition lands in 2027, ACMI is running a free Play School show aimed squarely at parents with young children, building the family audience in advance so Bluey inherits a warm crowd instead of starting cold.

This is where holding the brand steady pays off. Because the brand never resets for each audience, the audiences can accumulate instead of restarting every time. Tailor the offer as tightly as each community needs while keeping the brand and the relationship constant underneath, and a series of one-off spikes become compounding growth.

None of this works if marketing only shows up at the end to sell a finished product. At ACMI it sits much further upstream. Experience & Engagement, the department brand and marketing lives in, accounts for roughly a third of the organisation, and it shapes the work long before a campaign starts.

When ACMI weighs up which touring exhibitions to bring in, the marketing team is in the room. Hilary talked about a recent decision between two shows for 2029, which were assessed openly on their commercial and audience potential rather than curatorial taste alone. "It's been a journey and we're still working on it, but we're becoming much more audience-centric with a market-led point of view than we've ever been before". Curators still lead, but the question of who an exhibition is actually for now sits with marketing from the start.

The same goes for naming. Curators come with a working title, and marketing has the power to change it. For a recent show the team brainstormed names and tested them in market before settling. Success metrics are set together as well, and since COVID those have widened beyond ticket numbers to softer measures like whether a visit expanded someone's understanding of an idea.

The effect is shared accountability. When marketing helps choose and frame the work, the old reflex of blaming a weak result on how it was sold loses its grip, and the brand can stay coherent because the people in charge of it are involved early enough.

Everything ACMI says about itself comes back to one idea. "One of the biggest things we care about is that when someone walks in they actually feel like it's a place for them" Hilary said. The museum is taxpayer funded, so the claim is literal, and it is aimed especially at the fandoms who aren’t represented in a traditional gallery.

The obvious question is how to measure that, and until recently ACMI could only guess. It had brand awareness and sentiment research quarterly, and never had live data. Now they track perception continuously through Tracksuit, including a set of agree-or-disagree statements it can benchmark against other arts and cultural institutions.

One statement matters more than the rest. Whether people agree that ACMI is a place for you. They saw that score dip, so it fed straight into the creative response. "That can be translated into a creative campaign easily" Hilary said. "That kind of insight is gold". The exact promise the brand is built on became a number the team could watch, and a brief they could act on the moment it slipped.

It is an unusual way for a government-funded institution to behave. Two-thirds of ACMI's audience is under 35, well ahead of other museums. They get there by acting like a consumer brand, measuring whether its central promise lands and adjusting when it does not, while others think the work speaks for itself.

The lesson ACMI offers any brand challenges the obvious move. Facing many audiences, the instinct is to multiply, adding sub-brands and new voices for every segment. ACMI grows the other way. It holds its voice and values still while letting the product and offer flex as far as each community needs. Then it refuses to let those audiences slip away between campaigns.

Find the human thread your category sits on and hold it, then tailor everything downstream as far as each audience needs. Make sure the audiences you gather one campaign at a time have a reason to come back.

ACMI can be for everyone because it never tries to be something it’s not. The range holds because the brand underneath it does not move.

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