Episode 43

Rudy Fernandez Welcome to Marketing Upheaval. My guest is Brian Carr, Director of Marketing and Communications for Midtown Alliance in Atlanta. Midtown is a vibrant part of Atlanta. It's a business district, a neighborhood. It has 20 art and cultural venues and lots of restaurants. And like other urban areas, the pandemic has obliterated the status quo. Brian has more than 20 years of marketing and PR experience. And Brian and his team are finding new and creative ways to get people back into the city. Thanks for joining us, Brian.

Brian Carr Thank you so much for having me, Rudy, it's exciting to be on Marketing Upheaval.

Rudy Fernandez So first, just for everybody out there. Tell me about Midtown Alliance. What does it do?

Brian Carr So Midtown Alliance is a nonprofit organization with a 40 year reputation for getting important things done on the ground. So we're kind of unique. We are a community improvement district, but we're also a coalition of business leaders.

Rudy Fernandez Are you sort of intermediary between business public, private government,

Brian Carr That's correct intermediary would be a good choice of word, also a staunch advocate for getting progress to happen.

Rudy Fernandez I'll admit, Midtown is my favorite part of Atlanta. It's just got a really neat vibe. How would you describe the Midtown vibe?

Brian Carr Midtown is a really fun place, because you've got the confluence of lots of different types of corners of what makes a city fun. You have arts and cultural kind of vibe that's here. The counterculture movement has a big part of midtown to count as its growth in history. So LGBTQ communities have sought out Midtown as a place where we have ground zero for the Pride event that's unique to Atlanta, because it happens in the fall instead of in June. There's also a big, colorful history with hippies and the boarding houses that used to occupy areas on the outskirts of the central business district. I've got some great old pictures of people walking around rocking the bell bottoms mixed in with that is technology and business and commerce.

So what's interesting about Midtown is that you've got a huge conglomeration of law firms here. But then like right next to those, you might have something that's like a lot more, you know, off the beaten path, like maybe a Wellness Spa, next to, you know, to a law firm next to a restaurant next to an academic research institution. So the mixed use of midtown, in terms of what it has become over time is really a strength for us.

It Was One Of The Fastest Growing Areas In The U.S.

Rudy Fernandez You may have heard there was a pandemic, yes, some cities are starting to come back. Tell me about Midtown Atlanta, before and after the pandemic.

Brian Carr Absolutely. Before all of that happened. Midtown was all it's been on a growth trajectory and continue to sustain itself since around the time of the real estate market crash, you know, 10 or12 years ago now at this point out of that back in the 2010 11, 12... in that, in that time frame, there was a lot of upswell, for residential growth in Midtown, commercial business enterprises, that would be large development corporations really started to buy up land and begin to build projects. And what that really did was that created a lot more office space here. It created a lot more multifamily residential, meaning apartments, condos, things that are kind of in those vertical neighborhoods, in large skyscrapers. The commercial kind of economic and big indicators that talked about job growth pointed to about 30,000 new jobs were created or announced for Midtown Atlanta, within a span of maybe six, seven years during that run before the pandemic. And really, what that meant for us was that there was more interest in Midtown nationally, for a long period of time, it was one of the fastest growing urban areas in the United States. We're talking about a square mile, so about 120 city blocks arranged on a street grid.

And Then…

Rudy Fernandez And then,

Brian Carr And then yes, we kind of ground to a halt pretty quickly and midtown changed a lot. I was watching on the outside looking in to see, we have immediate needs to try to communicate timely information about what's happening. We're not medical experts, but we were wrestling with how much messaging we needed to put out to try to keep people informed. That could be sort of amplifying what public health officials would talk about, I remember that we were looking for ways to immediately begin to spotlight local businesses that were having to come to grips with the idea that, that they needed customers to make rent. But it was harder for customers to get to them. Because they were all being told to be away from each other. We all had to start to figure out like how to kind of set up shop and have a base of operations and keep working towards something. But we didn't know what we were really working toward. We just we'd like Well, we've got to keep doing things, because that's what we do. But we had to really start to fixate on, like, Where can we provide immediate, you know, help and be a useful resource for people that had been spending time in Midtown. But now we're finding that they were away,

Rudy Fernandez I thought you said at one point that 80% of the people in Midtown on any given day did not live in Midtown.

Brian Carr So Midtown pre pandemic was made up about 100,000 people that would spend time in this one square mile area on a daily basis, let's just use weekdays as an easy way to kind of consider this. So about 20,000 residents in Midtown people living in apartments and condos, about 80,000 Daytime workers. So that gets you to about 100,000 people, then you can add on top of that, probably on an average about another 10,000 people daily that are visitors coming to check out, you know, museums, galleries, shows that performing arts venues. So we were over 100,000 people before the pandemic. And then what we started to see was that the visitors went away because there wasn't anything open the 80,000 Daytime workers, they went away, because there wasn't a way that they could safely be in the office at the beginning. And then over time that sort of became you know, will be our next chapter, that conversation, which was around Office presence or not. But then you had left the 20,000 residents. And so we went from 100,000 people down to 20, 000 in the blink of an eye,

Rudy Fernandez Wow.

Brian Carr That is, you know, a major change for how people would experience a city. We're fortunate in that, because Midtown is a mixed use environment. We are fortunate that there are multiple ways that people can be here. But the residents really were the only ones here keeping up with things that were happening on the ground.

Our staff and our mission is predicated on idealism, optimism, that's where we're supposed to be as the cheerleaders about a place.

Rudy Fernandez You think that's kind of common to cities that drop? Is that pretty common?

Brian Carr That was what was playing out in cities all over the world, really, but you know, locally here? Yeah, that's, that's what you had is that if you were a resident, you had to go where are you where your home is, and stay there and shelter in place or quarantine. Keep in mind, too, that, you know, the service industry was just absolutely like, you know, turned upside down because of all that time away. And Midtown has a decent amount of service industry workers that are helping to do all kinds of things like serve a plate of food at the bottom of a office building, you know, for the lunchtime crowd, you know, to the stagehand that works at the performing arts venue that all of a sudden didn't have anybody to serve.

That population drop, really started to show us just how interconnected everything could be to this idea that when you take people away from the place, the place goes through a lot of changes and some tumult. So violent crime and crimes of opportunity increased when people went away, micro economies began to go through a lot of hardship, because there were fewer customers for things, empty streets, invited motor vehicles to drive faster, which created threats to people that were walking, trying to get fresh air, public improvement projects got deferred. And really what that meant was while those projects were stalled, materials costs went way up. And so then the price tag got more expensive to do some of the improvements that as an organization that we would be tasked with doing. And just in general, optimism in many corners of the community began to wane. Yeah, we could see that immediately from some of the negative thoughts and the sentiments that were expressed on social media channels that we operate. And we started to realize, people need something to feel hopeful about, somebody has to step in and fill that void in the public messaging.

Rudy Fernandez So I kind of know the answer to this question. So I'm cheating during the pandemic, what are some of the things you had to reach out to people

Brian Carr It was pretty it was it was like an out of body experience to not be here physically, but to know that when when the streets were empty, and that, you know, it was mostly only the residents here, but businesses also looking for a way to keep morale up. We needed to step in and fill some empty space there. The public health messaging was useful for some things, but the just the general message of optimism that's in our core Our staff and our mission is predicated on idealism, optimism. So that's where we're supposed to be as the cheerleaders about a place, we realized that like people needed something uplifting, and that we were in a unique position to deliver that on a lot of fronts, I was excited to reach out to you, because I saw that you were posting some things online about just that, we're in a really different time. It's not that we have to innovate our way out of this, it's that we get to and that we're being given an opportunity to come up with something new. We started talking, it was like, What can we do to give people something fun, and maybe a distraction from what they were going through.

Midtown Alliance playlist. Find the case study here.

And we realized that like, they were people that everyday would go out on walks in Midtown and get out in the fresh air and be alone, but being able to stay active and break up some of their monotony of their routine, we look at creating a community playlist, a way that we could build up song titles that pretty much with everybody having a mobile phone and some air pods, like it was a kind of a no brainer, that we could begin to create something contributory. So we started to open source it and ask people, What are some songs right now that you would really like to have, you know, at the top of your playlist, and so we put out signage, we can put out physical signage on light poles on street banners, and begin to create something that people could really opt into. And so it built up over time, that when people would take their walks, they would see this whole row of signs with song titles. And it was an immediate suggestion for how you could start to make your day a lot better really quickly with your mobile phone.

And then that kind of spun over into some longer range things that we started to realize as the pandemic evolved, as there began to be more permissions to start to be around each other again, maybe sometimes still, while wearing a mask and other times where you could be in a congregate setting and start to have smaller gatherings. And so we created essentially a public health campaign that reminded people that if you wear your mask, if you wash your hands, if you do the things that the public health officials are telling you to do, then we'll overcome this, and we will keep Midtown open on a national level, we kind of looked and saw that there just wasn't enough here locally, to tell people, This is what to do. This is how we're going to get through this together.

So we created this campaign that I think was very powerful, that began to give people fun things that they could do at a social distance, some graphics that were applied to the sidewalk, that created a way for people to dance with each other six feet apart, we created a series of messages that were aimed at businesses that were advertising that they could stay open, if you would come in and wear a mask when you enter the premises, we worked on some things that were around on the digital capacity to try to get people to do videos of themselves doing the hopscotch out on the sidewalk, you know, making it playful, but also kind of reinforcing that public health message, we felt safer to be back in some capacity back around each other on a more daily basis,

Sidewalk art installations encouraged social distance dance offs, hopscotch, virtual hugs and more. Find the case study here

We created a campaign that was really filled with optimism and hope. And it was predicated on a very simple word, but a word that has a lot of meaning inside my organization, which is just always look forward and be excited about what's coming next, because we're going to make it we're going to create that. And so that word was onward.

And I really liked how this came together. Because it was something that was colorful, it used all the bright colors from our palette of our brand identity. It had a message of optimism that said, if you're feeling good, you're in the right place, because this is where great things are going to be happening. It talks about, you know, what was hopeful that we were working on as an organization to bring people back into Midtown to improve the physical space. And I think all that was really powerful. All those campaigns from the playlist to the public health message made for a local level to the onward campaign, we did a lot of things to keep people engaged at a time when it was very hard to keep people engaged.

Rudy Fernandez Now we are sort of in the after times, and what's the story now,

Brian Carr Our existential crisis as an organization is that a lot of our financial wherewithal comes from office buildings, that is what gives us the ability to go make improvements out in the front yards and the front doors of those buildings. So without an office presence, our organization stands to lose a lot. So we have a very vested interest in trying to get more people to want to occupy space in Midtown and make commitments here, what we noticed is that we would start to reach out to property managers, and we began to try to construct what was essentially like a crude and simple survey of how many people are here, you know, right now. So nationally, what you see is that there are companies that install the card swipe terminals at doorways, which all collect data.

We really are on a mission right now to try to bring more heat out on the street and get more people here that are daytime workers to choose to be here instead of at home.

You can also do some things like looking in parking decks to see how full the parking decks are with vehicles for people that are commuters so we'd be got to try to take inventory and count how many people are back? What are people's plans, what we kind of saw was that we've arrived now in 2023, at a level where we've got about maybe half of the office workers again, 80,000, before the pandemic, now about 40,000, will come in on a hybrid schedule. And we began to see that the pattern settled in that Mondays and Fridays are the days when not as many people are here.

And Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday is when you'll get about half of daytime workers to be back in Midtown. So if you look at that from a recovery percentage, then we're about 50%. Back to what we had before the pandemic, office occupancy based on some new ways that we can count that with cell phone pings with GPS are starting to point to about 50 to 55% occupancy on a given week.

There are other places around the country where it's still a lot slower. But as I mentioned, Midtown is a place where there's a lot of technology companies, a lot of intellectual property kind of companies that rely on computers to do a lot of that work. And so it still is very enabled here for remote work to happen or hybrid work. But we really are on a mission right now to try to bring more heat out on the street and get more people here that are daytime workers to choose to be here instead of at home.

One of the most just blunt assessments that we got from an employer partner that we work with their question to us is what are we doing to justify the commute for employees. So as a business, they were working on some of the things that you've heard about, like you know, the office perks like free lunch on Fridays, or you know, get a chair massage, some of that stuff begins to smack a little bit of desperation, like, you know, you're needing to put some carrot out there for people to come.

How To Get People To “Linger Longer”

We wanted to kind of look at it a little differently and say that, what are we great at doing is bringing people together in outdoor public spaces, and people began to gravitate towards more during, you know, the time that we were isolated was when they wanted to have gathering places they needed to be in Alfresco environments where you could breathe fresh air, you look at what happened with, you know, necessity sparking invention, and a lot of municipal governments that were armed with nothing but if you paint cans could go out and remake streets for things like outdoor dining, or small places to gather.

And our organization really was already working on some of those things before the pandemic, but we really committed and put our nose to the grindstone during that time, to open up about 40,000 square feet of public space, plazas, some mini park spaces, we opened up a dog park, we opened up a patio kind of situation outside a couple of small retail dining establishments with tables and chairs, punctuated with public art. So all of those things began to tell us that we had a place for people that could gather, we needed to come up with some programming, to give them a reason and a date and a time and something really fun to do that would make you want to stay after work. And come do something fun.

Rudy Fernandez So it sounds like there's two parts one, how do we get more people to come here on a daily basis, but two people do come? How do we get them to stay longer and be enjoy Midtown morethan just come and go from work?

Brian Carr That's right, the term of art in our marketing world is linger longer, find some ways that you can have a reason to stick around. And what's great about Midtown is that there are so many restaurants here, we began to personify and tell the stories of the owners of some of those restaurants through a hyperlocal journalism effort called Love local, meaning that we would go into a business and ask some questions about why Midtown is a place that they wanted to be. Ask them how they've adapted their business to come through and weather the storm getting, you know a little bit more of like that kind of neighborhood feel about like, you know, what is it that they offer that's really unique and special? We worked a lot in the whiteboard space to figure out what would make somebody want to stick around after work hours, well we started to learn is that people like to drink alcohol. No.

That's something that's always a very popular draw is that kind of happy hour idea that could happen. People like live music. And there's plenty of that around a huge metro area like Atlanta with a lot of creative talent. People liked the idea of having some outdoor space where they can sit or congregate. And a place that's very easy to get to that's very accessible. So we began to really look inwardly at like, what can we do with some of those things that we know. So one of the cool things that has emerged from this that I'm excited about is that we began to do something a fairly cheap thrill for the investment here is doing outdoor movie nights.

Simple, you know, inflatable projection screen, pop in a DVD for something that's kind of, you know, a cult classic, and give people a place to spread out with blankets or lawn chairs. Byo you know beverages and food, get a popcorn vendor in and dole out some free popcorn and make it something fun and upbeat. We made a partnership With a local LGBT queue group here called out on film that does a lot of film festival kind of events. And so we've started a series of movie nights. And what's cool about it is that we had some people begin to reach out to us that are from office buildings, mostly like HR people, people that maybe have a stake in employee engagement.

And they began to ask some questions over email that just said, Hey, I saw this thing. I'd love to bring my staff, can we come? And I'm like, Yeah, this is for you. This is what it's for. And they started to ask them questions like, well, you know, do we need to pay and I'm like, No, you don't need like, this is free like, and I think that it was sort of a, an aha moment that in our communications, we weren't describing things that normally go with movie theater experiences, like you need to buy a ticket, or you need to reserve a spot or anything. And so we're just like, No, just come, just show up. And it's going to be fun, bring your coworkers make it something that you can do that kind of stay in play kind of activity, and you're gonna have a great time. And so that's what began to happen with movie nights. Then we also tried some other things that are around like acoustic Wednesdays. So we have a smaller kind of micro Plaza space, that's really just a wide part of a sidewalk next to a street that's not very busy street.

And we began to book local talent to come with nothing more than maybe an amp and a mic, you know, and just and set up shop and let people have kind of a relaxing, easy way to sit and enjoy music. Outside. We've recently instituted Thursday afternoon, yoga outdoors, in a park space, where we partnered with a local yoga studio, all you have to do is show up, bring your mat, in the summer heat, bring a little bit of water, and a person that's miked up with an amp and a mic, you know, they just they kind of go through downward dog and all those kinds of things. So these are things that are happening on weeknights, that are happening not too late after the workday would normally end. Like if you clock out at five. So you maybe have a little bit of time to kind of you know, switch gears, and then you can just you know, what's great about Midtown is that everything is walkable, it's all within a short distance. So you can get to any of these venues to come and do something. So that's our linger, longer approach. That's our way to try to justify the commute get people to want to be here, we've learned the hard way that like weather is going to be a factor. So you know, the sad news a couple of weeks ago was that the outdoor yoga got rained out

Rudy Fernandez Lightning yoga, take a chance

Brian Carr This may not be zen like but you'll still getyour stretches in. Again, we've had some realizations here that like in some of the ways that people think about this stuff, they don't understand that it's free. And that's a learning experience for us is that everything now needs to really be overtly labeled like, Hey, this is free, you can come there's no strings attached

What’s working

Rudy Fernandez In terms of how you reach these people, what's working and what's not.

Brian Carr Yeah, so with event marketing, what we're finding is that for the types of folks that we're trying to reach, email is particularly effective. That's a way that people are accustomed to receiving a lot of communication from us about hyperlocal news, big substantive announcements about maybe when like, there's a road closure that might affect something that they need to know about good news and celebratory things. So event marketing has really become tied closely to email, we're getting big, open rates on things for certain ways that we will present a lineup of you know, six things happening, you know, this month in Midtown that you can plug into, we've also found that Instagram is a very, very fast growing medium for us for certain types of things that have that sense of like togetherness, and something maybe with pop culture tied to it like our movie nights. So that's where people seem to want to go to find these things when it's a little bit more impromptu, and you can afford to kind of make a late breaking decision. That seems to be a place that people go to for this.

And then I mentioned to that just the old school community event calendars that happen all over the place in Atlanta with local media outlets have been also really helpful. So you just you have to remember to put all your your messaging out in these different channels to find ways to reach people. And what we found is that at some of the movie nights, like we would draw people from 30 miles away. Yeah, that's crazy. So we do a little bit of light serving before the movies began, where we'll just walk around with a clipboard, and I'll just kind of start glad handing a little bit. So hey, thanks for coming. How'd you hear about this, you know? And people said, oh, yeah, like I saw it on a community event calendar online. And like, Well, cool. How far away? Are you coming from it like 30 miles? I'm like, You gotta be kidding me.

Rudy Fernandez Really? So that's awesome. Think about that. They can watch a movie at home. Obviously, they could, but they came. I think you said Mableton. Is that where they came from?

Brian Carr That's a place where somebody came from Mableton.

Rudy Fernandez That's a little bit of a haul. That's up all the way from Midtown to be with is it to be with people or just have that Midtown vibe?

Brian Carr I do think it's a little bit of both. I think that there's something very serendipitous about seeing this outdoor space at night with buildings lit up with you know, just lights On in rooms that begin to kind of show that you're in the heart of a city, you're in a unique place to do this, you can also have something really fun happen out in a cornfield, you know, let's be honest like, but there's something really special and different about that. There's also the idea that you can pair this up with something to do beforehand. And so that kind of idea, you can knit together something fun, like maybe grab a meal out somewhere, yeah, and sit out on a patio while you wait for sundown, then make your way over to the park. And you'll have a spot where you can camp out and watch this movie. Those are some ways that I think it has the appeal, I think to that, like, in addition to the digital kind of reach that we can get, which has been really expansive reach, there's also just the analog version of this, which is just putting signage out where people happen to walk past these high traffic areas where these public spaces are, and just go old school like Not everything has to be viewed on a screen or replied to, in a digital communication channels, sometimes just post a sign that just says like happening here this week, movie night or yoga or whatever, you can also add QR codes, which we have found that kind of had their their resurrection.

Rudy Fernandez even grandparents know how to use them now.

Brian Carr Exactly, exactly. So you know, but some of those things just really started to cement all this. And then the third prong and all that beyond just those kind of digital analog ways is just that we maintain tons of relationships with people that are decision makers in the buildings that can proliferate out a message that goes throughout that building. Right. So you're thinking about property managers, or maybe the HR gatekeeper in a large company that occupies several floors, and an office tower, we keep them close to the vest, we've really tried to keep up with that contact list. We manage all that through Salesforce, to just know who are the people that are nearest these public spaces and these public events that we're doing that need to know this stuff. So we can make it very easy for them to extend an invite to everybody in their buildings.

Rudy Fernandez So I'm guessing that's the plan now and moving forward is you want to get people back in the office to get people back into Midtown. They're sort of pushing out the message for you.

Brian Carr That’s right. And so we're trying to give this as an opportunity for employers to get something for basically nothing, just like you get employee engagement, and all you got to do is show up, you don't have to pop the popcorn, you don't have to really, you know, it's easy for somebody to just come be part of it and count it as their own win within their organization, because they're all going through this right now. All the workplaces that have continued on some kind of hybrid schedule, or are kind of trying to feel their way through the relationships that they're going to have, and how they're going to navigate those relationships with employees going forward.

Yes, they can do some things within the four walls of their building. But I think that at some point that's going to become kind of, you know, stale. And there needs to be something that you can get out as a group and make an outing, and have it happen not too far away from your office building. That's what's great about a dense urban place is that you're never too far away from one of these public spaces.

Rudy Fernandez So all right, so what's the we're still at 55%? Is it going to change?

Brian Carr So I think the next layer to this is to bring events to where people are, where maybe it's like at the front yard of your office building, let's say. And so one of the things we realize is that we're a large staff in our industry at Midtown Alliance, we've got about 50 people that wake up every day, that think about this place, and how to connect people to this place, but we can't do everything. So we're starting to realize that like from a bandwidth perspective, we need to begin to make it easy for other building owners, offices, employers, to begin to want to take on some of this stuff and do it themselves. It sounds kind of daunting at the beginning. But we have several months of experience, to know what works and what doesn't. We have the ability to provide our expertise to help others begin to do some of these types of things and have them happen down at the ground level on the ground floor of their own buildings. We created something this year called the adventure capital fund, meaning that like we would provide some funding for some things that could be adventures in Midtown. So the venture capital world, you know, you're needing to submit a pitch, you need to come up with an idea that others feel like they can invest in. So we're doing that on the events front. And what I think is cool about that is that we've had some takers and they've come from the most unlikely of places.

A New Kind Of Partnership

But we just recently had a partnership that we struck up with some an organization that was looking to create something and make it happen with their resources. So the Lutheran Church of the Redeemer All right, and the faith community, Midtown is also often overlooked, but you look for community, that's where there is a lot of it. They were very motivated to create a community event, a block party, essentially to close down a street for an afternoon, bring in some live music, bring in some alcohol again, like all the things that we know are Caribbean here, with no strings attached. There wasn't a pitch to join the church or anything. But just to get through pulled together that are from the nearby buildings that are right around them.

Because they realized they didn't know their neighbors, they didn't know, some of their large corporate neighbors, they didn't know some of the mom and pop restaurants that were right next door to them. They just wanted an excuse to have people get together, outdoors. On an afternoon, that was a weak day. And so we provided a little bit of the resources, expertise, seed money, to help them get this off the ground. They recently had an event that attracted a few 100 people, which I think is awesome. Like, they got something accomplished that was important to them. And we got something out of it, too, that provided more heat out on the street, you know, with people being present congregating, you know, gathering, and that was like, that's kind of what I see as the next big frontier is to how can we make it so that other properties, other entities, other partners in this great community here, that they can have something that they can do on their own? Where it's feels like it's there's,

Rudy Fernandez t's still a work in progress, isn't it?

It is very much, very much, I think there's a high bar to have to overcome, for people to want to spend time on something that they otherwise don't think that they need. Yeah, that's part of it right now is showing them that, like, you gain so much from that kind of sense of weak ties, like they don't necessarily have to be all your best friends, but people that you can have a reason to talk to, even for just, you know, small talk, even a way to just kind of look people in the eye and say, Oh, you are a neighbor of mine, you are someone that's in proximity to me that I don't see because there are walls between us. And now you know who I am. That is what strengthens the community that's needed to come back after all this time in isolation. That's how you move the narrative forward as you begin to create those bonds or recreate those bonds that we kind of lost.

Rudy Fernandez I get you want to get people here who work here have jobs here? Is there any push to get people here? Who don't have a job here, but who just would really enjoy being in Midtown?

Brian Carr So I guess the way to answer that is we are very much interested in helping visitors to Midtown see bigger than just the one off kind of thing that they might come here to do to experience. So where do people come from? And where do they go? And then where do they go next. And so we're kind of seeing what that is that Midtown is a place where a lot of people that are visitors here, they know how to get to a one thing, how to get to a performing arts venue or how to get to a museum, I want them to learn or be open to the idea of learning that there might be like three and four things that you could do over the course of a day here. And what I realized is that people need a little bit of help there. They can't get there on their own they don't understand necessarily that Midtown is a place where you can drive in from the burbs, you can park your car once, go walk around, see cool stuff, and then get back in your car and go you don't have to just get in your car, do one thing and then get back out to the burbs.

we did much better (with click throughs) with photos of intimate moments that people were having, at Movie Night, for example, somebody holding hands with their partner, maybe somebody with like just this expression of just unbridled joy on their face.

We started to do a little bit of AB testing with images in the what is the event look like? So what we kept going for that we thought was like the right answer was, we didn't show big crowds like that Midtown has a habit in place where there's like big crowds of people, you know, lots of people like gathered for movie night. And what we kind of started to see was like, Okay, we got some open rates, and some click throughs on those, but we did much better. And we think the only difference was we began to kind of move the photos more towards like, the poignant kind of intimate moments that people were having, at Movie Night, for example, where like, they like somebody holding hands with their partner, maybe somebody with like just this expression of just unbridled joy on their face. So we kind of zoomed the camera in a little bit more. And I think that did a little better for us over time. Because it wasn't necessarily about like, there'll be 500 people here come you know, it was more like you're gonna get to do something fun on a much more personal level with people that you care about. And I think that's going to be something we continue to try to work on is like to memorialize these events for things like an annual report or a board meeting, update, and begin to really kind of turn the narrative from like big crowds is what we care about to personal connections between two people or more is what we care about.

Rudy Fernandez That's great. What are some things that you think post pandemic are here to stay and some things you think that are going to evolve and change over time?

Brian Carr One thing that I think that will stay is that remote work is still going to be here like hybrid work? Yeah, that like for a lot of the types of jobs that are here in present in Midtown that relate to intellectual property or knowledge and you know, finance and insurance and law, that not all of these things have to happen every day in a physical space where you can be productive and do focus work. But I do think that we're going to try to find some middle ground here that says that like Midtown has the chance to evolve, and become a place where you seek it out for the days that you are here and present in an office environment, that you're going to really try to make more out of that day than just slog in, do the work in the office, because your boss told you you needed to, and then you know, move back out to home. So I think that we need to keep continuing to try to find ways to really ride that wave of like, if it's going to be midweek, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, then that's where we need to concentrate more of our activity,

When Midtown is at its best, you know it because the streets are bustling with people. There's that people are happy, they're building that trust and social connection to each other, even just by seeing each other, you don't have to even talk to people, but just being around people that we stand to gain a lot from that by continuing to invest more in community events.

I think to that, like, you know, in terms of making people feel happy about being here, we just need more events, we just need to keep piling on more things to do. When Midtown is at its best, you know it because the streets are bustling with people. There's that people are happy, they're building that trust and social connection to each other, even just by seeing each other, you don't have to even talk to people, but just being around people that we stand to gain a lot from that by continuing to invest more in community events. I think that what's here to stay is that people know that they can settle into a pretty easy routine with finding ways to get outside and walk to things. It's not all you don't have to be indoors all the time. I think that what may be different a little bit and what's continuing to change. One of the things that I kind of see that makes me a little bit apprehensive here is just that E commerce continues to be something that chips away at our sense of public life and belonging to a place. Ecommerce is really a threat in some of the ways to the things that I care about as a marketer of a place. When you look at things that really got accelerated during the pandemic, like online grocery orders, online, grocery sales are projected to grow by like double digit growth in the next several years. And what that takes away is those serendipitous little encounters that you get to have when you go through the aisles of a grocery store and do something out in the public sphere.

Be Nice To Your Cheese Guy

My personal story for that is just like, we have a small grocery store in my neighborhood, there is a guy that is like kind of like the cheese guy like he's just that's where he always is. That's his station. And he's the super nice guy. He always seeks out my wife, and I'm over in the store and he greets us. I don't know his name. He doesn't know our names. But he sees us he sees my family. He asks us how we're doing. He always greets us with a smile. We ask him how he's doing. He told us recently he's going to see relatives in Morocco. It's just small talk. It's easy things but we do it for each other because we need it from each other. Yeah. And those are things that kind of make you more connected to a place. And it's easy to do. I feel that like E commerce and some of the things that we've grown more accustomed to saying like, Oh, I can trade off going out to do something that has the convenience of what it's going to bring to me that I really like to remind people that there are local businesses that don't all participate in that there are some things that we really need to have happen to try to create reform so that E commerce pays more into the local economies, and it takes from them. And that I think that that's one of those things that's kind of like a barrier that I'm hoping that people will choose the serendipitous encounters that they get to have with their with their cheesemonger and just make it something that like when you leave that that encounter, and you're happier, and you feel like you got to do something for just a brief moment there. That was good for somebody else, too. You know,

Rudy Fernandez That goes back to your personal connection. I think that's the missing piece. I think everybody who are working from home and your video conferencing with people, you don't have that. And I think that is for Midtown for so many people who want to market a place. I think that you hit that perfectly. I think that's probably the key, the personal connection that people want and need that they're willing to drive 30 miles to get it. Yeah, I think that's maybe the key moving forward,

Brian Carr That will be a key. And it's up to us to try to personify that to put a voice to that, to begin to show and spotlight some of the happy things that have come from that, that maybe allow for more room for people to imagine just the thing that really keeps me excited about my job every day. And that is the possibility of cities. It's the possibility. It's the idea that like, you know, cities are where people and ideas come together. And without it, we're less complete.

Rudy Fernandez Thanks, Brian. I appreciate your time, and it's gonna be a great show. I really appreciate being on the show

Brian Carr Thank you so much for having me. This has been a blast.

Rudy Fernandez Hey, thanks for listening. For more information about Midtown Atlanta and everything they have going on. Go to midtown@aol.com that's midtown@atl.com or follow them on Instagram at Midtown_Atlanta. For previous episodes and transcripts, visit creativeouthouse.com/podcast For some of the case studies we discussed go here. And remember, if the current state of marketing has you confused, don't worry. It'll all change. See ya