Real Estate & Land Use
The places where we live, work, shop, travel, dine and otherwise experience are all key components in developing and enhancing our broader communities and culture. To communicators, each and every space presents a unique opportunity to think about how the places we inhabit—places where we carry out our daily routines, where we host our special events or even just where we make dinner plans—all have their own interesting stories to tell.
Placemaking is an important theme that plays out across a broad range of our team’s work every day. For ticketed experiences and Michelin-starred restaurants, luxury apartments and world-class offices, for neighborhoods, parks and cultural institutions—BerlinRosen deploys a broad range of strategies and tactics to create bespoke narratives that help people across a variety of audiences (consumers, travelers, investors, industry leaders, etc.) understand what makes each place worthy of their time.
One of the most recognizable instances of placemaking is the promotion of an event or, increasingly, an experience. Such is the case with SUMMIT One Vanderbilt, a new observation deck located adjacent to Grand Central Terminal in the heart of East Midtown. To support its opening, the BerlinRosen team deployed an aggressive earned, owned and paid media campaign. The strategy looked beyond the obvious to capture consumers’ interest—focusing on stories that gave context to the design and artistic elements of the space. We invited more than 400 digital influencers to experience SUMMIT firsthand over the course of several months, effectively creating and publishing a library of organic content post-opening. A waterfall of TikToks, Reels and in-feed posts enhanced the media coverage and was reinforced across SUMMIT’s owned channels as well. Paid ads—on digital boards throughout Grand Central Terminal and on LIRR trains, for example—generated broad awareness and drove ticket sales.
Retail locations are particularly well-positioned to benefit from creative placemaking campaigns because they are open to the public, which is often a prerequisite for editorial coverage. As the retail landscape continues to evolve, owners, operators and developers are working hard to differentiate their retail spaces. For example, Industry City in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, is rapidly becoming a hub for homewares shopping, leased by national name-brand retailers as well as local artisans and craft makers. BerlinRosen has amplified the ongoing growth of the complex’s design presence—announcing West Elm’s expansion and the additions of Kohler, Hilti and the Brooklyn Made Store. These retailers joined an already robust lineup at the complex, which includes Porcelanosa, Design Within Reach Outlet, RH Outlet, abc carpet & home Outlet, IC Store by WantedDesign and The Makers Guild—an immersive hybrid of design studios and retail that allows visitors to witness makers’ processes and shop their creations. Our design placemaking strategy at Industry City has also attracted several architecture and design studios to put down roots at the campus, including Ishka Designs and Athena Calderone (EyeSwoon).
Similarly, cultural institutions—like museums, theaters and libraries—have the unique opportunity to lean into placemaking to not only reinforce a brand, but to also leverage communications to tell impactful stories about their mission and core values.
Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts is in the midst of a bold reimagining of its campus to make it more dynamic, accessible and reflective of the city—and world—around it. Last fall, BerlinRosen worked closely with Lincoln Center to open the much-anticipated new David Geffen Hall—implementing a nuanced, multi-layered media strategy to authentically tell the story of an institution committed to actionable change. The new Hall, home to the New York Philharmonic, was remade with vastly expanded public spaces; a new restaurant by Chef Kwame Onwuachi called Tatiana; and engaging public art installations thoughtfully honoring San Juan Hill—the historically Black and Puerto Rican neighborhood that was razed in the mid-1960s as part of a government-sponsored “urban renewal” plan to make way for Lincoln Center. The evolving Lincoln Center campus is one that combines art, culture and civic-mindedness to offer New Yorkers from every walk of life a chance to connect and engage with each other—and the broader world.
Multifamily properties, because they are not “open” to the public, require more tailored communications strategies and tactics. For example, the communications campaign for The Suffolk—a recently-launched luxury apartment building in Manhattan’s Lower East Side—targeted local and regional publications to generate awareness, in tandem with design-focused press coverage to highlight the building’s high-quality interiors and amenities. The campaign also included a dedicated program for social media influencers. As part of this program, the developer, Gotham Organization, provided day passes for influential lifestyle content creators to enjoy the rooftop pool in exchange for organic content. We designed the overall strategy to meet audiences on the platforms they’re on and to provide the content they’re looking for.
Office buildings typically have the most defined audiences. When we think about office properties, the audiences generally include brokers, trade publications and business leaders. In addition to earned media placements, leveraging owned channels like LinkedIn and Instagram enables us to directly target key audiences with appropriate messages. LinkedIn’s network is incredibly powerful, as these campaigns can be tailored to reach brokers, investors or business leaders, and can be augmented by additional tactics such as press coverage, participation in industry events and award submissions.
Large-scale mixed-use developments—or even literal neighborhoods—often present the most complex assignment. Their audiences can be spread across a wide range of residential, consumer and retail, corporate industry, hospitality and cultural stakeholders. The communications plans for these types of projects have to seamlessly knit together elements across all categories, layering together key moments, project milestones and real world trends to create consistent, compelling narratives. As is the case with the redevelopment of the Domino site in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Over the course of its revitalization, our team has supported retail openings, residential buildings completions, opening of public playgrounds and parks and, most recently, the redevelopment of the Refinery at Domino, a 460,000-square-foot Class A office building.
Every placemaking strategy starts with knowing audiences and defining key messages; from there, these strategies increasingly incorporate earned, owned and paid channels. Whenever possible, we take every opportunity to put the right messages in front of the right people. It’s a matter of being creative and persistent to reach audiences in interesting ways—compelling individuals to take action: visit, dine, shop, live, work.