#MonaLisaFixed art contest on DeviantArt
This campaign is an art contest that I worked on in 2022 while I was in the role of Creative Lead at DeviantArt. The campaign was the winning entry in an internal marketing challenge and was conceived by team ‘Oh Nice.’ Team ‘Oh Nice’ consisted of myself and my colleagues Dan and Chi.
Once the design team began executing the project my role as Creative Lead was to steer the creative direction, give design feedback, keep the team on deadline and ensure that the end result was engaging, impactful and encouraged submissions, likes and comments.
The contest was called ‘Mona Lisa Fixed’ and the idea was to get users to submit new, ‘better’ versions of the Mona Lisa. Our concept as to flip the traditional art contest on its head and instead ask users to create entries that were bad or funny or just plain weird. We wanted DA users to have fun!
Team
Concept created by Katie Mantle, Chi-Wan Cheung and Dan Leveille
Creative Lead Katie Mantle, Designer Karen Tsai
The Mona Lisa
The most celebrated piece of art in the world. Archetypal masterpiece of the Italian Renaissance. On permanent display at the Louvre, Paris since 1797. One of the most valuable paintings in the world.
So we challenged users to 'improve' the Mona Lisa
We wanted to lean into our brand value of audaciousness. This was no stuffy, traditional art contest. We wanted to users to create something new, different, clever, funny or just plain weird.
Planning
WHY – We identified why this contest would be popular. We believed the Yassify trend, popular ‘Nailed it!’ content and previous successful funny campaigns we had done would mean this contest would be popular.
TARGET AUDIENCE – We identified the users we wanted to target. Creators who have a unique style, love to create fan art, can be experts or amateurs since the bar for entry would be low.
KPIS – We planned out what our key performance indicators would be.
HOW – We also planned how to make the contest easy to create and fast to execute.
Excerpts from the pitch deck
Journal and support drivers
The contest landing page was created in an editor journal on the site, which is a page that can be more quickly created than a coded CSS site page. We created contest ads for the DA site and also social media assets and an email.
Pixel art badges
Designer Karen Tsai
We created pixel art badges to be awarded to any user who submitted art to the Mona Lisa Fixed campaign. Pixel art badges that DeviantArt gives to users are displayed in their profile.
With this contest for the first time we decided to create a special update to the badge to commend the winner.
Winner gets a billboard!
The winner of this contest, DeviantArt user @Yecow, was awarded a billboard announcing their win and showcasing their new Mona Lisa. The billboard was in Los Angeles on the 5 freeway.
