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CITY CENTER DEVELOPMENT COMPANY

Challenge:
Since transforming the Fort Worth skyline in 1982, City Center's two landmark towers have rarely had entire floors available to lease. Yet that was the situation confronting this Bass Family-owned development company when Harcourt Brace Jovanovich closed its City Center offices, and Pier 1 decided to vacate City Center in favor of building a new skyscraper of its own.

Strategy:
Witherspoon developed an "available space" campaign in order to position City Center to CEOs and commercial real estate brokers as the downtown address for businesses ready to move to the next level.

Solution:
A full-page ad largely devoid of copy and graphic content, and touting "available space," served as the launch vehicle for the campaign in the local business media. Subsequent ads employed the concept of an elevator button to target businesses interested in moving up to "Class A" office space.

A concurrent direct-mail campaign targeted commercial real estate brokers. Each received a locked box containing either a bottle opener, a pepper mill, a hockey puck or a set of golf balls, along with a certificate good for an evening of fine dining, a round of golf or admission to a professional sporting event. To find out the combination of the lock (always corresponding with the number of one of the four available floors), the box's recipient first had to have a conversation on available space with a City Center leasing agent, and hear a pitch about scheduling a tour.

A second direct-mail campaign was aimed at CEOs of prospective tenants, and leveraged the same elevator-button metaphor employed in the newspaper campaign. Each CEO received a boxed elevator button, reminding him or her that a perception of upward mobility accompanies a City Center address.

Results:
The ads built immediate awareness of the availability of space at City Center, and jump-started communication with the commercial real estate brokers who were the core audience for the campaign. Following delivery of 90 broker boxes, City Center received 42 calls from brokers requesting lock combinations. Of these, 16 eventually toured the floors available for lease. Ultimately, D.R. Horton, the nation's leading homebuilder, decided to lease four floors for the relocation of its headquarters from Arlington.