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Martin Biedermann, Head of Marketing and Communication #77 Of what use is the ORF to museums? The ORF initiative "Long Night of Museums" has been an integral part of cultural life for 20 years and is one of the highlights of every cultural year. Around seven million visitors have taken up the invitation of ORF and the cultural institutions to take a nocturnal stroll through the museum landscape during this time. A success with the public that ORF can be proud of. Making art and culture tangible is one of ORF's most important missions, which it fulfills not only in all its programs and media, but also off-air.

In 2020, in times of pandemic, a "Long Night" with 400,000 visitors could not be held in the usual sense, but ORF still wanted to set an example. As the largest cultural platform in the country, we therefore launched the 'ORF Museum Time' action week at short notice together with the participating houses. In doing so, we provided an important impetus in this challenging time for art institutions to visit museums and exhibitions, demonstrated the diversity of the Austrian museum landscape and encouraged Austrians to engage with art and culture. From 3rd to the 10th of October, 2020, the most important museums, galleries and cultural institutions offered special promotions such as discounts, special programs, children's extras and much more under the label "ORF Ticket." ORF provided the media platform for this initiative with its programs on radio, television, online and the regional studios. 

In addition, ORF Marketing promoted "Museum Time" with an ad campaign in all relevant print media, 100 TV and radio spots on ORF and an online banner campaign on the ORF Network. In addition, a new website was created and adapted to the "Museumszeit": All participating museums and their offers could be found on langenacht.ORF.at. As part of the new "ORF Museum Quiz," interested parties were able to answer questions and, based on their answers, were sent personalized museum tips for their province. In a raffle, the public could win annual tickets, family admissions, books, publications or goodie packages from the participating museums. In addition to repeating the successful ORF Museum Quiz, ORF is planning the ORF Museum Challenge for 2021: Under the motto "Time to finally give your favorite object at home a stage!", ORF is calling for the big ORF Museum Challenge and will let users present their unusual (art) objects, which will then be chosen by the community.

ORF Museum Time" was also part of the comprehensive cultural focus in ORF's program, which became even more of the country's cultural platform due to the Corona-related closures of cultural institutions: This ranged from broadcasts such as "Fidelio" from the Theater an der Wien on ORF 2 to numerous ORF III offerings and the online culture channel ORF.at/kulturjetzt to the Ö3 "Treffpunkt Österreich" concert stage or FM4 "Stay at home" sessions for local musicians and Ö1 online culture forum. In the digital space, we have set further accents with our VoD platforms fidelio and Flimmit. Whether off- or on-air: We bring art and culture to the Austrians.