Atlanta to woo young professionals at SXSW

When: March 11-20

This Austin festival devoted to film, music and interactive technology is often the place where movies and new technologies are introduced and where some of the top minds in each sector schmooze and strike deals. The festival started in 1987 and eventually grew beyond music to tech and film. Keynote speakers at this year’s festival include President Barack Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama.

Austin might be weird but Atlanta wants to show young professionals and creative thinkers that it’s still cool.

The Metro Atlanta Chamber, through its new ChooseATL marketing campaign, plans a two-day sales pitch next week at the famed South by Southwest festival to recruit young professionals to come to the Big Peach.

The flashy effort at the music, film and technology gathering comes amid troubling signs that metro Atlanta has lost some luster with young professionals in recent years.

It’s far more than a booth in a convention center (though it includes that, too). ChooseATL will rent the three-floor Speakeasy lounge on Austin’s Congress Avenue and load it with headliners such as rapper Killer Mike, a panel with the founders of Atlanta-based social platform Yik Yak and an event on Georgia’s burgeoning television and film industry with an executive from the hit series The Walking Dead.

Plenty of states and cities send economic development groups to the festival to recruit companies. This campaign, chamber CEO Hala Moddelmog said in a recent interview, is about recruiting creative people.

Wooing companies to relocate is still a bedrock of the chamber’s mission, but the war for talent is just as important, she said.

Millennials are the largest generation in the workforce, and it’s the best-educated, most diverse and most mobile generation in American history.

“The competition is stiffer and (millennials) are a mobile group,” she said.

Great Recession ‘reset’

Winning them has gotten tougher for Atlanta. A 2014 report from City Observatory found that Atlanta was near the bottom of top U.S. metros for the percentage growth of college-educated adults 25 to 34 from 2000 to 2012.

Atlanta competitors such as Houston, Nashville and Denver, among many others, had much higher growth rates, the report found.

The AJC asked to Atlanta Regional Commission to crunch numbers for the 10 biggest U.S. metros and other key competitors to look at the change in population for 25 to 34 year olds.

In 2000, metro Atlanta ranked third in the percentage of its population aged 25 to 34, according to ARC data. By last year it was 12th. Austin — dotted with “Keep Austin Weird” signs — remained No. 1 during that time.

Mike Carnathan, a demographer at the ARC, said no major metro studied gained in overall share of the 25 to 34 population from 2000 to 2015, but Atlanta saw a sharper decline than others.

Carnathan said this has much to do with the Great Recession, which slowed mobility.

Before, he said, “It was easy to quit your job in a more expensive metro area, get a similar job in a less expensive metro area and you just sort of cash out. What the Great Recession did was reset all of that.”

Atlanta’s economy sank lower than many metro areas after the downturn and has taken longer to recover, Carnathan said, though he added it is gaining momentum again.

Suburbs included

Launched in 2015 by the marketing group Nebo Agency and propelled by the chamber, ChooseATL focuses not only on Atlanta but also its varied suburbs. It includes videos on the region's culture and business climate as well as interviews with up-and-coming entrepreneurs.

The effort launched with more than $4 million in support from area businesses, and South by Southwest is its coming out party.

Kate Atwood, who leads ChooseATL, said the campaign will measure initial success through personal and digital contacts with young professionals. The group wants to reach 1 million young professionals this year, and after SXSW will hit college campuses and other major gatherings nationwide.

The strategy for following through with prospects is in the works. It could involve Atlanta creating a new international event, officials say.

Talk has swirled for years about Atlanta using an existing festival to promote the region’s creative arts and technology scene — a South by Southeast, but with it’s own name and Atlanta flavor.

“So much of our story is the assets we have here,” Atwood said.

The chamber declined to say how much it and the ChooseATL partners are spending on the Austin campaign, but it is likely in the high six figures.

Over the past several months, ChooseATL held parties at Ponce City Market, Spitfire Studios and SweetWater Brewing Company to drum up support and recruit people to carry the Atlanta banner in Austin.

The group has enlisted about 1,000 metro Atlantans who were already headed to SXSW to be ambassadors to talk up the region. Atlanta Mayor Kasim Reed will address the main convention on the topic of mobility in big cities. There will also be some 30 Atlanta musical acts performing at Speakeasy.

Beyond concerts and other official SXSW events at Speakeasy – branded Sunday and Monday as the ChooseATL House – chamber executive Grant Wainscott said SXSW push will feature a heavy social media campaign on Snapchat, Facebook, Twitter and other channels.

Warts and all

Atwood said her group won’t shy away from the region’s warts, such as a reputation for congestion. The pitch, she said, will involve showing the Atlanta area’s history of young people getting involved and not only building businesses and careers but also making a difference in society.

Atwood is an example. The Virginia native moved to Atlanta to start her career with the Peach Bowl at age 23. She started a nonprofit called Kate’s Club to help children cope with the death of parents or siblings. Atwood was 12 when her mother died of cancer.

Instead of going home, she founded her nonprofit in Atlanta, and it has helped more than 1,200 children.

Another is Jewel Burks, a co-founder of Atlanta tech startup Partpic. The Nashville native said she grew up feeling drawn to Atlanta, but started her career at Google in California after graduating from Howard University.

She later moved to Atlanta to be closer to her family, taking a job with a parts distribution company. Not long after that, she convinced a close friend and Morehouse College grad who worked at Shazam to return to Atlanta to start a mobile app to help people identify replacement parts.

Partpic is sort of like the mobile music app Shazam that helps identify and download songs from clips of audio, except Partpic helps identify parts using a smartphone’s camera.

Last year, Burks’ company won the big data pitch competition at SXSW Accelerator. She’s going back this year to woo clients and find potential investors — and pitch Atlanta in the process.