Copyright Adweek
Every city has a brand, and Atlanta’s is one marked by collaboration and community. At ADWEEK’s Brandweek conference in Atlanta, the music icon Ludacris and Tony Ressler, Atlanta Hawks owner and executive chairman of Ares Management Corporation, spoke with ADWEEK CEO Will Lee about the city’s underappreciated business potential. For Ludacris, finding business opportunities was all about keeping an “ear to the street.” “When I worked at the radio station here, everything started on a street level. It would catch on, and then you would hear it in commercials.” Originally from Illinois, Ludacris moved to Atlanta as a teenager, and said the city’s diversity and its collaborative creative scene gave it prominence in the music industry. Atlanta today is “a hub for all things,” Ludacris said, with the film industry following in the music industry’s footsteps and tapping into all it has to offer to creatives. This reflects Ressler’s experience as well. As owner of Atlanta’s NBA franchise, Ressler knows how community powers business. “When you buy a basketball team, it’s just a different type of business than most, because it really is a community asset,” he said. Upgrading the Atlanta Hawks facilities impacts a downtown environment that hosts 20 million to 25 million people annually. And it’s also part of building the Hawks brand, Ressler said, because second-tier facilities don’t attract the best players. Despite this promise, however, Atlanta has a major marketing problem. “Atlanta should be doing a little bit better, I must say, in brand building,” Ressler said. When Ressler moved to the city about 11 years ago, he did not appreciate the breadth of what Atlanta had to offer, he said. But it has the world’s biggest airport, and top-tier universities and colleges. “It’s the capital of the Southeast,” he said. “It is a remarkably attractive headquarters for Fortune 500 companies.” Even though Atlanta doesn’t get as much attention as Ressler thinks it should, the future looks bright. Ludacris has his eye on legacy, generational wealth, and communicating his business acumen to the next generation. And Ressler is also focused on legacy and communicating to the next generation as well, in particular bringing business acumen to younger Atlantans, so they can build their own brand and access capital to power their own businesses.
