As the pandemic continued, requiring operations on a shoestring marketing communications budget, a regional architecture firm found itself struggling to gain quality media visibility – until Blattel helped it shift gears.
Objectives
- Gain national-level visibility for the regional architectural firm.
- Highlight the firm’s innovative approaches to real estate reuse projects.
- Smooth an unusual project’s journey through local bureaucracy.
- Achieve media coverage in the firm president’s wish list target: Fast Company.
Audience
- National business prospects
- Real estate owners and developers
The Story
Our longtime architectural client was forced to reduce its marketing communications budget in the face of the pandemic and several stalled projects. As a result, national business publications – and especially the company president’s favorite, Fast Company – became the priority (and a lofty goal for a shoestring budget).
With the benefit of a year’s worth of groundwork and historical data under our belts, we began targeting the top ten outlets, responding to key reporter’s coverage, suggesting follow-on angles and developing pitches with a national flavor, despite the fact that the client’s work was heavily concentrated on the West Coast.
The Breakthrough
Three months in, we got our Fast Company break: the design reporter bit on a pitch around innovative real estate uses – specifically a Bay Area Peninsula car dealership that was reconfiguring its real estate to accommodate its continued auto sales operations while also making space for development of much-needed housing and retail in a multi-level plan.
We prepared the architect client, who was interviewed about the design approach, and the client’s client – the dealership owner – was interviewed about the economics of the move.
Results
A piece on this smart real estate strategy ran in Fast Company and was picked up by several other outlets, including in the automotive dealer space.
Fast forward a month, the mayor of the city in which the dealership is located and where permits were pending contacted the designer – congratulating it on the outstanding press and assuring that this is just the sort of project the city needs.
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