Why We’re Creating New Positions In The Middle of a Pandemic
Photo by DJ Impulse
On September 9, 2021 my phone started to blow up from travel industry friends and acquaintances asking how in the hell we’re inventing positions out of thin air in the middle of a pandemic. On that date, we were featured in a 3-page article in Hotels Magazine entitled “Why Your Hotel Needs a Sonic Identity” wherein the author, Jeff Weinstein credits the leadership at Revival with hiring Jason Bass as director of Culture & Impact and DJ Impulse as Director of Content & Sonic Identity. It was right there, in the first paragraph where I think the head scratching (and perhaps, head shaking) began. Weinstein adds “A community-driven effort led by atypical “hoteliers” that has recognizable impact is part of a noteworthy shift as hospitality and its ever-changing traveling communities start to come out of the COVID-induced hibernation.” Jason and Impulse hosted events at Revival in 2019 and now they’ve become invaluable contributors to our success. We believe anyone in the hospitality business would benefit from having a couple of industry “outsiders” around the table. I’ll explain why.
What in the world is sonic identity?
Jason’s origin story is detailed in a post from January 10, 2021 entitled “A Story About Impact Hospitality” so, I’ll focus on Impulse and his role here. Candidly, it might be the head-scratchiest job title in the company. Most folks understand the content part. It’s social media, soup to nuts- photos, captions, replies, emojis, etc. “Sonic identity” is where some people call us gimmicky and get off the bus. But, it’s more than just creating a couple of playlists. Impulse describes it as “knowing what should be playing where, when, how loud and why it pours into the brand.” Here’s how it became an invaluable part of the Revival culture.
Since I started as GM at Revival, we’ve been on a crusade to localize as much of our spend as possible. A big part of uplifting our community is supporting it with our dollars. Within that community there are folks who’ve become a part of the Revival family in a way that’s so organic it feels almost coincidental. We keep a mental inventory of the skills, talents, gifts, and capabilities within that group. The Revival vibe is so different that it becomes hugely beneficial to work within the existing network of people who don’t need to go through freshman orientation to understand what we’re doing around here.
One day in the before times, Jason, Impulse and David (owner of The Charmery, an amazing ice cream shop concept based in Baltimore) set out to show me a few spots. This is my earliest memory of Impulse quietly snapping pictures like he’s a shy paparazzi on the red carpet at The Met Gala. The rest of the guys were acting like this wasn’t, at best, off putting and, at worst, weird af. I thought to myself, “Oh he DOES this. Cool.” By the time I got home there was a pic on his Instagram story of a lighthearted but reflective moment when I grabbed a roller and added some paint to a “Black Trans Lives Matter” street mural. We were leaving the city’s favorite gin bar, Dutch Courage. Transparently, we were a few drinks (per bar) in at this point. So, it wasn’t until the next day that I got to really look at the photo. It was…professional. I don’t know the most about photography. But, that pic was fire. And just like that, in my mind, we went from “Oh, cool, Impulse brought a camera to the bar.” to “Impulse is a photographer.” File that away for later.
I’ve always challenged the idea that critical parts of our marketing and branding should be built around content that is created and managed and offsite. In many cases, it’s not just outside the building and the org chart. It’s outside the time zone and outside the cultural ecosystem. Social media was an example of that. I won't name the company to protect the innocent and also because they did exactly what we expected them to do. But, that was when we didn’t realize a better aligned alternative existed. Our setup was a pretty standard one. We pay a firm in California to create the lion’s share of our posts and then we supplement with pics captured by people on the team (a social squad, if you will) and whatever UGC we can get approval to repost. We would have a calendar of posts 30 - 60 days out from the company that we would approve in advance and off we go. This served us pretty well despite the voice in some of the captions being a little disconnected. We had roughly 13K followers across our 3 Instagram accounts (@revivalbaltimore, @topsidebmore, @bsidebmore) and 25K followers on Facebook. The process was a little clunky, at times. We would send content to them and then they’d write a caption and figure out when to post it. They were on a retainer for X hours a month. This meant they had to pick which meetings they’d be able to call in for. But, there were lots of meetings where something exciting popped up in conversation organically. Then someone had to bring that info to the next call and distill down this brilliant idea that one their colleagues came up with for the benefit of the company. I had spoken with our director of sales & marketing about it and he agreed that the setup was suboptimal. Enter Nike Air Max Day.
“I love a good pair of Jays as much as the next guy, but…”
We were off to a great start with programming in Q1 of 2021. We went into March with the wind at our backs. Jason had an idea that excited my frugal sneakerhead altar ego. He has a friend who was the founder of something called The Sneaker Exhibit. He went on to explain that it’s a weekend of dope activations created and amplified by Black women who love sneaker culture. It typically takes place in early October. We could work with them on ideas for Nike Air Max Day. For those of you wondering, Air Max Day is yet another brilliant idea that probably started with someone in the Nike marketing camp. They shared that they’ve experienced that the sneaker community is not always the most welcoming space for women. So, a panel discussion about that would be one of the events we’d put together. Perfect. We booked it. We reached out to the uber talented Kendra Robinson to create some specialty cocktails for the event and put together a full weekend of great stuff. A week or so out, I was stalking our Instagram feed, as I’ve been known to do, and our Air Max Day post had just hit…with a crystal clear picture of a fresh pair of…you guessed it… Jordans. Facepalm.
“Admittedly, I struggle with hip hop…”
In the early days of my tenure at Revival, I would get a text or call a few times a month stating that profanity or worse just played over the sound system in the lobby or the restaurant. We had a playlist consultant at the time who had put together a few solid lists for our spaces. He had his own proprietary hardware setup that he would dial into from New York to make updates. After these issues were raised, I asked him to create Spotify versions of both lists so I could review them song by song. His response was “But, they’re like 12 hours each!” I couldn’t tell if he was objecting to the request or shocked that I was going to listen to 24 hours of music in the name of quality control. In fairness to him, he hadn’t worked with me very long at that point. I burned through those lists in a few days and sent over edits as I went. Then I would send random songs that I heard in life via Shazam link with a quick text saying something like “Thoughts on this for Topside?” Or “Have you heard the new” so and so album. Over time we curated something respectable. And then on April 30, 2021 at 5:27p EST a song played off Jeru The Damaja’s 1994 “The Sun Rises In The East” album that was so inappropriate that I literally laughed in frustration. As the ancestors would have it, I was working from the board room at Revival and Impulse walked in and said “Yo, you’re not going to believe what’s playing in the lobby right now.” When I reached out to the consultant, his reply (after a spirited exchange) was “admittedly, I struggle with hip hop. But, I know you want it on the list.” Put simply, hitting the button that was supposed to filter out all of the spicy content didn’t always catch what it should. The bigger problem is that the algorithm was picking our songs.
Impulse gets bit by the spider
Two facepalms in a 5-week window was more than I could accept. I had a thought. But first, a quick bio. Impulse is a 20-year pro as a DJ. He knows all of the songs. All of them. The thing he emphasizes most about DJing is reading the room. “Put me anywhere on God’s green Earth…” The ability to see moments come together and anticipate what comes next has led to some extraordinary photos. Beyond that he’s a coffee aficionado and a sneakerhead. In other words, he’s a massive cultural fit for Revival. After the Jeru fiasco, I pitched him. “Bro, you gotta help me. I need you to take this over.” He quickly agreed- “I got you.” But, I was thinking about all of it. The way I saw it, he could curate the playlists throughout the spaces, capture razor sharp photography of interesting moments with his DJ Spidey Senses, and post them on our social media channels hot off the presses. I recalled that he managed the social media account for a business in the past. I saw one of the videos and it was fantastic! “What would we call a role like that?” I had no clue. What would we pay for a role like that? “Exactly what we’re paying now for it…all of it.” The objective was to be better, not to pay less. The price was right. The outcome was what needed to be adjusted. So, I totaled the monthly retainers for our social media and playlist contractors, then amicably terminated those agreements.
Impulse got to work. The impact was noticeable and immediate.The Instagram feed was more cohesive and there was a nice bump in Instagram Story activity and engagement. Likes and comments were also up significantly across the board, leading to a steady stream of new followers. The playlist has all the substance and nuance with none of the songs with titles that are too inflammatory to blog about, let alone play. The music has now been mentioned in over a dozen online reviews (and countless compliments from guests and team members) in a few short months. Reach and engagement on our social media posts are up an astounding 114% and 86.7% respectively . Then Impulse walked in after a few months spent in the then untitled position that we’d built around his talents. “I got it! Director of Content & Sonic Identity.”
