New Anzac Centre at Albany

Anzacs at Albany. Source: National Anzac Centre website.

Excerpt from Adam Bender, ‘National Anzac Centre unites physical and virtual consumer experience’, CMO Marketing, 10 November 2014

Visitors can experience the memorial online if they can’t make the trip to Albany, WA through a mobile-optimised website and innovative new content offering.

The Western Australian Museum has brought together the physical and digital experience consumers can have of its newly opened National Anzac Centre with a mobile-optimised website that interacts with the Albany, WA site.

Visitors to the centre receive one of 32 character cards focusing on real soldiers in the First World War. By scanning these in card readers throughout the Centre, the visitor receives customised content based on the experiences of that particular person in the war.

At the end of the exhibit, visitors are asked to leave a tribute or comment about their character’s experiences.

Aware that not everyone can make the trip to Albany, the WA Museum has also replicated the experience on a website, presenting all 32 characters’ stories in a digital format. “It’s linked on a one hourly call to the physical site itself,” the WA Museum’s manager of digital services, Morgan Strong, told CMO …

More than 500 comments have been posted so far, and they are all viewable at both the website and physical location, he said.

The website was developed by external digital agency, Precedent, in parallel with the physical site over a 14-month period. Including the physical and digital components, the Centre cost $10.6 million and was funded by the state and federal governments.

The digital component was a “fundamental requirement” for the building of the Centre, said Strong.

“The underlying objective was that this story has to be accessible to everyone. That’s what drove every single decision that was made,” he explained.

“Whether or not you could physically visit the site, or you could only virtually visit the museum’s website, the same information and the same experience had to be available.”