For years, a big part of my job was making a building interesting to people who'd seen it a thousand times.
I led a small team of social creatives working on the Empire State Building's channels. The brief, in short: the building is iconic, everyone knows it, and younger audiences don't think about it at all. Make them care. Then turn that attention into ticket sales and office leasing.
Here's what I learned, and most of it applies to any brand people think they already know.
Being famous isn't the same as being interesting
The building had no awareness problem. Everyone on earth recognizes it. It had a relevance problem. To a 20-year-old it was a postcard, something their parents photographed.
That reframing changed everything. We stopped trying to show people the building and started trying to show them a side of it they didn't know: the people who keep it running, the odd history, the view from places tourists never see, the building reacting to what was happening in New York that day.
Give the brand a personality, then commit to it
The turning point was deciding the building could have a voice. Not a corporate "we", but a character. A bit dry, proud of its city, fond of a joke, very old and unbothered by trends while somehow always on top of them.
Once that existed, every decision got easier. Would the building say this? Would it care about this trend? It also made the account feel consistent even when we were posting fast, which on TikTok you have to.
The lesson I took from it: a personality is a decision-making tool, not a style guide. If your team can't use it to settle an argument about a post in ten seconds, it's not specific enough.
Small teams win on speed
We were never a big team. That turned out to be an advantage. On TikTok, the window on a trend or a cultural moment is a day or two. A process with five rounds of approval misses it every time.
What made it work was trust in both directions. The client trusted the voice we'd agreed on, so most posts didn't need sign-off. We knew exactly which topics did need it, and never pushed those.
The pretty posts weren't the winners
Our most polished, expensive pieces were rarely the top performers. The posts that took off were usually quick, a little scrappy, and built around a clear idea in the first second. A strange fact. A joke. A view people didn't expect.
That's not an argument against craft. It's an argument for putting the craft into the idea and the edit, not into the production budget.
Tie it back to the business
Followers are nice. They're not the goal. The account grew by well over a million followers across TikTok and Instagram, but what made the work valuable to the client was connecting that attention to tickets and leasing.
That meant running proper paid support behind the organic winners, building reporting that showed how social fed the funnel, and being honest about which content drove action versus just views. My reports showed which kinds of posts actually moved ticket sales and office leasing, and that's where we doubled down. That's how the work kept its budget year after year.
What I'd tell any brand with the same problem
- Figure out whether you have an awareness problem or a relevance problem. They need very different work.
- Give your brand a character specific enough to settle arguments.
- Set up approvals so the team can move at the speed of the platform.
- Spend on ideas and edits before you spend on production.
- Report on what the business cares about, not just what the platform shows you.