It’s one step forward and one step back on a project planned to promote development in the city of Peekskill.

With some fanfare at a Chamber luncheon held at Gleason’s downtown in February, city officials introduced the launch of a months-long project to produce a marketing and advertising campaign to promote the city.

Funded primarily by money from a portion of Peekskill’s $10 million grant from the state’s Downtown Revitalization Initiative (DRI), the city hired Weinrib & Connor to film and produce videos, design a logo, create a branding and marketing strategy and launch a campaign.

Now, six months after explaining how they would carry out their charge to the Peekskill business community, and with no campaign underway, Weinrib & Connor is out and the project is taking a fresh start.

Speaking at the Aug. 5 Peekskill Common Council work session, Director of Planning Carol Samol asked the council members to approve a new request for proposals to find new vendors.

“After months of work, we concluded that for us to get the product we wanted for our marketing efforts we would need to take a different approach with a different specialized firm and team. So we’re parting ways with Weinrib and Connor,” Samol said.

The city will now ask for bids in sequence to first find a new vendor to design a branding logo and possibly a tag line as well. A separate RFP will follow to design a marketing and social media campaign. Samol said there is approximately $130,000 left in the original funds budgeted for the overall project.

The council members agreed to the proposal and the Planning Department will now present an RFP agenda item for the Aug. 12 Common Council meeting.

Months of work, then a sudden termination

Weinrib & Connor won the bid over several other candidates and signed a contract with Peekskill in October of 2023. The Mount Kisco-based firm, with over 30 years of experience in the industry, has worked with municipalities including the Bronx, Yonkers, Mount Vernon, Westchester County, the state of New Jersey and the city of Newark, according to Tom Connor, a principal of the firm.

Their list of private sector clients include Benjamin Moore Paints, AT&T, GE, Dr. Pepper, ExxonMobil, the New York Yankees, the United States Tennis Association and many others.

While the contract amount was listed at $174,000, Connor said his firm’s portion was $99,000. The city added additional money to pay for paid advertising and to hire additional consultants to provide social media and DEI outreach according to Connor.

At an original meeting of the community in late December 2023, approximately 40 people joined in on a zoom call. That group was pared down to form a Project Advisory Committee that recommended who should be featured in videos.

The target audience for the campaign started out as millennials, according to Connor, which he championed, but over time that was changed to a wider approach. His firm interviewed more than 100 potential Peekskill people to film, and wound up producing interviews with 75 of them, shooting the film in 57 different locations over a 10-week period from mid-March to Memorial Day. They also did branding and logo work for each category to accompany the videos.

The goal was to produce 24 finished videos, eight in each category – real estate showing homeowners who promote living in Peekskill, videos to attract tourists, and eight businesses located here. Weinrib & Connor delivered rough cuts of some videos to the Planning Department and 120 pages of proposals, Connor said.

After the project started, Peekskill Planning Director Jean Friedman retired. Samol then came on board in December of 2023. “I had been clamoring from day one that if we’re going to get this thing to debut in the spring we have to start making decisions in February,” Connor said.

Falling behind the original schedule

While the original schedule called for a May debut of social media posts promoting tourism and a video of a lavish dance number production up Central Avenue, as well as paid advertising to begin in June, without approvals of finished videos in hand the project fell way behind its target dates. “We kept pushing and pushing to get a Memorial Day debut,” Connor said.

Two 30-second videos promoting the Open Studios event by the Peekskill Arts Alliance in June were shown to city officials by Weinrib & Connor just before Memorial Day at what turned out to be one of their last meetings with the city.

While Connor says the Open Studio videos showed the “proof of concept” of their template of how other videos would use the interviews already filmed, city officials were not impressed. “Despite the fact the video scored well, the client felt they were inadequate,” Connor said.

Connor told officials that the Open Studio videos performed well on Facebook and Instagram but they weren’t convinced.

Also disappointed with the proposed logo they were given, Samol and other city officials decided to terminate the contract.

“A good part of our charter was to prove the efficacy of our work, but when that wasn’t a cathartic conversion I said we’re dead,” Connor said. “You knew this isn’t going to turn out right, there’s something not right here. Our separation and divorce was imminent.”

After several weeks of discussions, the city and Weinrib & Connor agreed on a final payment and terminated the contract.

Re-launching the marketing program

According to City Manager Matt Alexander, the city now has multiple assets that can be used in marketing efforts going forward, including video footage of the city and its environs and interviews with residents, business owners, students, parents, teachers, and others; draft landing page art and copy; a draft logo; contact lists; other research and strategy briefs, and other products. Weinrib & Connor was paid $83,377, Alexander said.

Regarding who will make the final creative decisions for the city, Alexander said “As with many municipal projects, different decision-makers are involved at different stages of work.

“The City also relies on input from advisory group members for projects such as this. Ultimately, senior staff make recommendations to the Common Council for determination.”

In a memo to the Common Council for the Aug. 5 work session, City Economic Development Director Matthew Rudikoff wrote:

“The City desires to capitalize on the experience of new staff leadership and partner with specialized consultants to create an inspired and compelling marketing and branding strategy that honors the City’s history and creativity.

“The Department of Planning recommends a targeted and sequential creative focus, first developing logo and brand and then creating a marketing and social media strategy.

“Future work will mine the insights of Peekskill residents captured in candid interviews conducted in the first phase of work and build on the guidance provided by members of the Project Advisory Group.”

Connor remains convinced that his agency would have delivered the positive results that Peekskill hired his firm to produce.

“This is a simple situation where the agency and the client were on two different tracks,” he said. “The agency was mindful of urgency and deadlines. The client was preoccupied with community reaction instead of taking the hint that we had this successful debut with positive results we could build on.”