The Mob Museum is a centerpiece museum destination headquartered in Las Vegas’ former federal courthouse, where it tells the tales of the country’s most notorious underworld figures. It has been named one of TripAdvisor’s Top 25 Museums in the United States for two consecutive years.

Inside the museum, three floors of interactive exhibits, historic artifacts, and immersive displays showcase both the local and national history of organized crime from the Prohibition era to the present. Yet because the Museum is located away from the tourist-heavy “Strip,” the city’s visitors sometimes missed the opportunity to explore its riches.

A new approach to the past

The Mob Museum wanted to utilize a full range of approaches to sharing the stories behind its collections, so we designed, tested, and built a microsite dedicated to the history of Prohibition. By engaging an audience on the devices they use everyday, the microsite captured public imagination around a captivating era in history and drove ticket sales to the museum’s physical location. In addition to creating a responsive site that performed well across platforms, we also paired the site with an interactive racing game, where users could take the wheel of a smuggler’s truck and deliver booze to a stash house.

The site—accompanied by a series of high-quality digital display ads—spiked interest in the museum’s exhibits and was honored with a gold ADDY award in 2017.

True stories told well

To further engage visitors with the museum’s fascinating cast of characters and artifacts, we created the “Two Men” print and digital advertising campaign, focused on the choices that brought historic figures either into the mob or law enforcement. By creating this dichotomy, we set up an alluring question for visitors to consider: in their shoes, which side would you be on?

As the culmination of our campaign for the Mob Museum, we created a custom-designed highlight reel video celebrating their 5th anniversary and energizing the greater Las Vegas community about the museum’s future.

Launching a new experience

The Mob Museum recently turned to Cardwell Beach again to help launch their new on-site speakeasy, distillery, and exhibition on Prohibition. Our team conducted historical research, led branding exercises, and plumbed customer insights to develop a name of the space— “The Underground”—and even design the labels and packaging of the in-house spirits from the distillery.

To help raise visitor awareness of the new space, we designed a full range of marketing and advertising campaigns, ranging from print and digital campaigns to billboards and bus wraps. Then, to help jumpstart attendance to the new space even further, we redesigned, reconfigured, and relaunched their website to better reflect these new visitor offerings.