City of Eugene
Rediscover Downtown Eugene
Reintroducing a downtown through the people who make it — the anchor film of a year-round push to get residents back to free downtown events.
View campaign video
The overview
A post-pandemic campaign to bring residents back to Downtown Eugene, told through local voices and street-level b-roll. One campaign film and one social cut, crossposted across City accounts as the anchor of a year-round push promoting free downtown events.
The campaign film
Strategy
A community storytelling campaign designed to bring residents back to Downtown Eugene after COVID-era disruption — told through the people who live and work there rather than a top-down civic pitch. When downtown foot traffic thinned out, the problem wasn't that Eugene had stopped caring; the habit of showing up had quietly broken. So rather than sell downtown as a place, the film reintroduces it as a community.
Audience
- Primary: Eugene-area residents who stopped visiting downtown during and after the pandemic.
- Secondary: community members looking for local events, arts, dining, and small-business experiences, plus downtown stakeholders and partners.
Goals
- Rebuild positive sentiment and familiarity with the downtown core.
- Show that downtown is active, welcoming, and worth revisiting.
- Support local businesses, artists, and community life through renewed foot traffic.
- Create an evergreen asset to anchor seasonal and event messaging.
Touchpoints
Three local voices carried the film — an artist, a community member, and a small-business owner, each with real, different stakes in the same few blocks, and each shot in their own downtown environment for an authentic, lived-in feel.
Interview prompts surfaced why they choose downtown and what they want residents to reconsider; b-roll grounded them in real streetscapes, storefronts, murals, and gathering moments.
Rollout
The output stayed deliberately tight: one hero campaign film and a single social cut — one story built to travel. The film launched in May 2024 and was built to work year-round, anchoring messaging around free downtown events across every season. The whole campaign ran organically, with no paid media behind it.
Platforms
- Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, and the City of Eugene website
- Crossposted across City accounts to multiply reach without extra production
The collaboration
- Eugene Recreation
- Eugene Public Library
- Eugene Cultural Services
- City of Eugene
- Eugene Parks
The film was the anchor of a larger, ongoing push to promote free things to do downtown. From it, we began producing seasonal postcards that pointed people to a new free-events webpage — turning one story into a repeatable, cross-channel campaign.
Yield
The film crossed 15,700 views across social and web, with hundreds of interactions as it was crossposted across five City accounts — all organically, without a dollar of paid media. Local voices built credibility and avoided a top-down tone; pairing interviews with authentic environmental b-roll helped viewers picture themselves downtown again. Most valuable long-term: it gave the City a reusable, evergreen anchor for promoting free downtown events rather than reshooting from scratch.
What I'd do next
- Cut per-person spotlight versions from the same interviews, so each voice gets its own shareable moment.
- Track outcomes with UTMs tied to the free-events page and partner listings.
- Refresh the b-roll seasonally to keep the evergreen film feeling current.
Photo gallery
Printed materials
