Following the successful February Travel Massive Glasgow event at the incredible Macs Adventure office, we met up last night for Travel Massive Glasgow’s big March event at Clydesdale Bank’s Centrum Offices on Queen Street. We spoke to Rosie Street from the Glasgow Science Centre (GSC), and she talked about how she has created several successful marketing campaigns for GSC, including when they famously launched a Tunnock’s teacake into space.
Rosie Street – Glasgow Science Centre
How to Create Award-Winning Marketing Campaigns
Rather than giving us a presentation, Rosie Street and Chris Torres had a casual Q&A before opening up questions to the audience. Rosie is the marketing manager for Glasgow Science Centre (GSC) and she started when GSC was planning to rebrand and re-develop the website. She explained that while GSC might just seem like a family day out, it is a much more complex organisation that works with the government and with big corporations.
Chris was eager to ask Rosie about her most successful marketing campaign: when GSC scientists launched a Tunnock’s teacake into space. There are several versions of this story now on YouTube, but it was observed live by people all over the world. The experiment achieved viral success, reaching around 15 million people, with coverage all over the world. Rosie emphasised that it was important to her was that the scientific integrity of GSC was maintained throughout the global news coverage; when the story was shared around the world, the message was consistently centred around ‘Glasgow scientists sending teacake to space to educate people and spark people’s imagination in science and technology’.
Rosie went on to talk about the GSC brand, which is ‘Science, with a Scottish accent’ and how the teacake campaign’s viral success came down to the innately Glaswegian personality and sense of humour, but also because the science behind it was impressive. Part of the success was also due to Brian Cox commenting on the video… Rosie spoke about other GSC campaigns and told us that Google Ads and social media marketing worked best for them so far as they often don’t have the schedule of events sufficiently in advance to rely on traditional print advertising. Coming from the perspective of an agency, it was fascinating to hear about Rosie and GSC’s marketing approach.
Rosie is a strong advocate of getting up out of your normal working environment when you need to come up with creative ideas, and she also recommended speaking to people who aren’t in your normal circles, as they can help you see something from a completely different perspective. Rosie’s team recently won The Welcome Trust funding to help them try to reach out to adults who are perhaps not interested or engaged with science and it will be fascinating to see what she and her team do next!
The Glasgow Chapter of Travel Massive is still pretty young, but it’s growing from strength to strength and we had another good turn up last night — although not as good as previous months, so we really hope to see plenty more people at the next event. If you want to meet up once a month with 225+ other tourism professionals and business owners to network and knowledge share, then make sure you sign up to Travel Massive. Membership is totally free and you’ll find some free food and drink at all of the Glasgow Chapter events.
Next month, we’ll be talking to Bridgeen Mullen from The Clydeside Distillery and Kathi Kamleitner from Watch Me See. The event will take place at the Clydeside Distillery and guests will also be taken on a short tour of the distillery! If you have any questions about Travel Massive Glasgow, or if you’d like some help with your SEO, PPC, content marketing, and social media, then please feel free to get in touch!
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