We love it when clients win awards for projects we contributed to! A little bit of tooting our own horn here, but in reality, all the credit goes to the Downtown Tempe Authority for their second award for the January 2025 Tempe Blooms event! First, they won an IFEA award earlier this year, and as of last week at the IDA 71st Annual in D.C., Downtown Tempe may now hold the scepter and reign supreme with an Award of Excellence!
Tempe Blooms was a pivotal, full-circle project for Bright Brothers. We designed the updated visual identity for the 2025 event. We handled the marketing planning, campaign management, and media buys. We surveyed attendees. We tracked performance across owned, earned, and paid performance, as well as foot traffic validated by Placer. The results? Astounding! Instead of focusing on vanity metrics, we tracked what matters most to the district and its ratepayers, and the two-day event paid off in spades!
- We increased subscribers and followers across our top four comms channels
- We had a goal of 70K attendees across two days, and blew it outta the water with over 82K according to Placer!
- Ultimately, we drove almost $2.5MM in economic impact to district ratepayers who spent heavily at hotels, bars, restaurants, and local purveyors!!
How did we do it? We used our vetted POSTR process for planning, designed the campaigns based on DTA’s Personas, and made shrewd use of the district’s marketing budgets. The public loved it. The sponsors loved it. And the district is already planning for a third Tempe Blooms come January 2026!
Lori Foster, the fearless leader of the Downtown Tempe Authority, told us, “We’re proud that Tempe Blooms has been recognized by the International Downtown Association with an Award of Excellence. This event not only showcased the creativity and spirit of our artist community, but it also generated a significant economic impact for our district—bringing thousands of visitors downtown, supporting local businesses, and strengthening Tempe’s position as a vibrant destination.”
Keep your eyes peeled for more district-wide goodness and economic impacts from Bright Brothers. Again, BIG KUDOS to the relentless and tireless work that the Downtown Tempe Authority does for its constituents!
We love people on a mission to better their communities. And that’s all of us, right? Yes, but some practitioners and consultants are at the forefront, leading the charge and working directly with districts on amping their collective brands and revitalizing their downtowns, and that’s exactly what we loved when we met Jaime Izureita from Storefront Mastery. Our co-founder, Josh Yeager, and Jaime met while working on the Experience on Main Street conference in Manchester, UK, this past year, and met up to compare notes. A serial entrepreneur and coming from a background in architecture, Jaime brings wit, wisdom, and some seriously smart strategy to downtown, districts and commercial corridors that lead to brighter revitalization through cohesive physical and brand experiences. Jaime’s consultancy, Storefront Mastery, has won awards and helped downtowns and districts you may know, like Downtown Grand Rapids and Michigan Main Street, Rochester, MN, with the city and their DMO, Destination Medical Center, Downtown Santa Ana, California, Jamestown, NY, and the Florida Main Street organization. Base din New Jersey, they’ve worked with the Chelsea Economic Development Corporation in Atlantic City, the Montclair Center, Plainfield SID, and Bound Brook improvement districts, New Brunswick Tomorrow, Fair Lawn Main Street, and the city governments of Trenton, East Orange, and Kearny — so you can see there’s quote a breath of experience in working with place-based orgs.
Their costs are extremely affordable, and they’ve developed systems to help organizations that are bootstrapped and have low cost, so for less than $10k, you can have a tactical blueprint to leverage the contributions of local businesses to the overall downtown experience.
Their clients are not the individual businesses but the organizations, so we developed a standard “Storefront Accelerator” that assesses the opportunities of the business and works directly with the owners to upgrade their offering, operations, and value proposition, and create a storefront design that manifests the way their business operates and serves as a branding element. And then they also work with cities in larger capacities, developing Experience strategies to tell their downtown stories with Placemaking and performative ideas. Exactly the kind of pioneering and empowering projects we love to see!
Jaime is an accomplished businessperson and noted that he has over 20 years of experience working in the public and private sectors. He founded an architectural practice, a design and placemaking agency, an independent bookstore, a city development agency, a museum, and a city! On top of that, he’s written two books and created several learning materials to help both local business owners and place management organizations to create great storefronts and fabulous downtown experiences.
Lastly, we asked Jaime about one of his favorite quotes, and he has this to say: “Every downtown business is a hospitality business,” and that is the mantra I try to instill into every project I work on. Give Jaime a shout if your downtown or district needs a glow up, because he’s clearly one who can help!
Photo credit: storefrontmastery.com
… that Bright Brothers Strategy Group doesn’t just work with downtowns and districts — our breadth of expertise extends into all sorts of place management orgs, including CVBs, DMOs, tourism bureaus, and even cities directly. We’ve won awards for our work with cities, and we LOVE taking the mechanics and typologies of placemaking, visual identity, public realm, and digital media to new heights for our clients. Case in point, we recently wrapped a regional identity project for The Greater Bangor Region, including 21 communities situated in picturesque vistas, working together to promote the region. When we started, they were merely a collective group of places that wanted to be a renowned destination. Today, they have a unified, inclusive, and flexible brand architecture, visual identity including full brand book, logos, colorways, and all the bells & whistles you’ve expected from a top-notch destination. They’ve got a website to show off their region, ten social handles to spread the word, photoshoots, sizzle reels, and social media cuts, plus a suite of OOH and public realm assets like street pole banners, flags, digital kiosks, swag packs, and more to put The GBR on the map! We also developed a multi-year strategic roadmap for the DMMO to national over the coming years. The Bangor Daily News was in the room when we presented the final public wrap-up report and post mortem, and was particularly interested in the Rove iQA kiosks being installed as digital wayfinding, and name-dropped both Bright Brothers and our fearless peers from Starkey Strategies who helped us take this big-ass, beautiful branding to the next level. We’re so grateful for the opportunity to put another notch in our placemaking belt, and invite you to give us a shout if your branding is lacking, underwhelming, or downright in need of a refresh!
Fact is, your website traffic is probably taking a pretty big hit right now. Everyone’s is, thanks to AI results in search usurping traffic that would have previously clicked through to you. And social isn’t much better. There’ still plenty of play on TikTok, but if you’re chasing your tail on Meta properties, you’re probably putting in more juice than you’ll get from the squeeze. Many clients overlook the power of email and newsletters, which are (or should be) your number one performance marketing channel. But you need to be smart, savvy, and strategic as to how you amp and grow your strongest comms channel, so we wanted to share this brilliant piece from Inbox Collective that demonstrates precisely how to go about ramping and amping your email comms in today’s media landscape. Enjoy!
Photo credit: by charlesdeluvio on Unsplash
You’ve heard of Pizza Rat and Mickey Mouse, ofc, but did you know that the rats in NYC are such sophisticated city slickers, they morph the way they speak in response to the city bustle around them? Researchers studying New York City’s estimated three million rats found that these urban rodents have adapted their ultrasonic vocalizations to match their noisy surroundings, with subway rats communicating more loudly than those in quieter parks. Using AI, thermal imaging, and ultrasonic recordings across three habitats (parks, sidewalks, and subways), scientists discovered that NYC rat calls are shorter in duration and fall outside the typical frequency range reported for brown rats in scientific literature. The study also revealed social patterns, with smaller juvenile rats traveling in groups while larger adults tend to forage alone, highlighting how urban wildlife adapts to city living. What does that tell us about the rat race in Manhattan?
Photo credit: by Adobe Stock
“We’re proud that Tempe Blooms has been recognized by the International Downtown Association with an Award of Excellence. This event not only showcased the creativity and spirit of our artist community, but it also generated a significant economic impact for our district—bringing thousands of visitors downtown, supporting local businesses, and strengthening Tempe’s position as a vibrant destination.” — Lori Foster, Executive Director, Downtown Tempe Authority
