We help museums and cultural venues grow their commercial marketing.
atrium works with cultural spaces to ramp up their venue hire and partnerships, working on how they're positioned, presented, and marketed to the brands and businesses already looking for them.
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atrium is led by Jack Shottel, a marketer and strategist specialising in venue hire and partnerships for arts and cultural spaces. Based between Newcastle and London, Jack's background spans cultural institutions, nightlife and fast-growing tech companies.
The practice is built on two and a half years working with Nxt Museum in Amsterdam, where venue hire and partnerships were developed from scratch — improving visibility, sharpening the proposition, and building long-term commercial activity with partners including Mastercard, Porsche, Adobe and On Running. That experience shapes how atrium works: practical, grounded, and built around what venues already have – spaces that inspire.
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atrium is built around a hands-on, direct approach to each project.
I work closely with each venue, from initial thinking through to implementation.
Every project is shaped around the space itself, its audience, and the realities of the internal team. The focus is on making practical improvements that can be implemented quickly and built on over time.
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atrium works with small to mid-sized cultural venues, including museums, galleries, and independent spaces.
These are often organisations with strong programming and a clear identity, but limited time or resource to develop venue hire and partnerships in a structured way.
The focus is on venues with the potential to host brands, events, and collaborations.
In 2026, museums, galleries and cultural venues offer exactly what many brands and businesses are looking for — memorable experiences, cultural credibility, and creative and inspiring spaces for events and offsites.
Most marketing teams can’t do it all
Cultural marketing teams are built to drive exhibition footfall and sell their programme.
Increasingly, they're also expected to market venue hire, brand partnerships and corporate events — without the time or specialist knowledge to do it properly.
As a result, strategy isn’t a priority, enquiries are inconsistent, past collaborations aren’t given the spotlight they need, and there's no clear line between marketing effort and commercial outcome.
atrium works with venues to change that.
How atrium fills the gap
Every atrium project is led by Jack Shottel, and starts with a fresh look at what already exists, the spaces, assets and current marketing setup. From there, we’re focused on delivering practical and hands-on solutions, focused across three phases:
Phase 1: Audit and strategy
We’ll run an audit of your current venue hire and partnerships offer and deliver a tailored, phased and target-driven strategy document.
Phase 2: Set-up
We’ll work together across any or all of the following: optimising enquiry flows, developing website page content and case studies, increasing impressions and clicks via LinkedIn, implementing email nurture campaigns, and testing and learning with paid Google Search ads to capture existing demand.
Phase 3: Optimisation
We’ll consistently test, learn and iterate to optimise and grow the most effective channels for building visibility, outreach and inbound enquiries.
What we can offer
Discovery
Making sure the right people can find you — improved visibility across the channels corporate audiences actually use: Google Search, LinkedIn, venue hire listing sites.
Outreach
Building a pipeline that doesn't depend on inbound: targeted outreach to event managers, partnership leads and decision makers, backed by a proper CRM and contact strategy.
Credibility
Giving prospective clients and partners something to reference: case studies, website content and social proof from past events and initiatives.
Tracking & attribution
Connecting marketing activity to commercial outcome: enquiry forms, analytics and pipeline reporting that give your team visibility on what's working.
atrium x Nxt Museum
atrium is based on work delivered at Nxt Museum in Amsterdam over a 2.5 year period, building the commercial marketing function from scratch at one of Europe’s leading destinations for digital and new media art.
As a unique immersive venue, we focused on shaping and selling Nxt’s offering around company events and product launches, as well as team visits and educational workshops.
Our work resulted in a +136% increase in bookings value year-on-year, over 220 enquiries in the second half of 2025, and partnerships and events with Porsche, Vogue, Adobe, Cetaphil, On Running, Prosus Group, The Macallan, Mastercard and many more.
+136% in booking value YOY
220+ enquiries in H2 2025
Events with Porsche, Vogue, Adobe, On Running, Mastercard + more
"Jack is a gem! He not only brings structure and a clear strategy to any project or team he joins, he’s also an absolute joy to work with. Looking forward to recruiting Jack again when and where I can. "
— Melanie Argento, former Marketing Director at Nxt Museum Start a conversation
If you're exploring how to develop venue hire or partnerships at your cultural venue, feel free to get in touch. We’ll be happy to share thoughts or take a look at your current setup.