Aldermen approve payment to continue Why Berwyn campaign

The Berwyn City Council Tuesday unanimously approved a $100,000 payment to the Berwyn Development Corp. [BDC] to continue funding the 14-year-old “Why Berwyn” campaign dedicated to promoting Berwyn as an edgy, eclectic place to visit or even buy a house.

The campaign is known for its billboards, strategically placed along highways, hovering over selected Chicago neighborhoods with tag lines including but not limited to “nothing like a suburb,” “handcrafted community,” “full of characters” “old school, not prep school,” “Berwyn rising,” “at the center of life in Chicago,” and “live culture shouldn’t always be found in your yogurt.”

The money for the campaign will come from three of Berwyn’s tax increment financing districts (TIFs), according to a March 19 memo to the council from BDC Executive Director David Hulseberg. The objective of the campaign is to “create a driving desire to visit, shop and live in Berwyn,” the memo states.

The 2021 Why Berwyn budget includes $39,000 for billboards, $20,000 for digital marketing, $10,000 each for print marketing, the 5k Mariarchi Event and the whyberwyn.com website, $6,000 in community engagement and $5,000 for photography and video.

The memo also breaks own how much each TIF district will contribute: $34,383 from the Depot District TIF, $43,532 from the Harlem Avenue TIF and $22,085 from the Roosevelt Road TIF.

Alderman Jose Ramirez (3rd) questioned how the BDC gathered resident input about where and who the “Why Berwyn” campaign targeted.

“I think Berwyn, especially the Latinx community, is beginning to flex their vocal muscles. So I think this is a time when we can say ‘Hey, become part of us. Become part of what we’re selling here,’” Ramirez said.

Erika Corona Owens, the BDC’s director of chamber services, said the shift in the “Why Berwyn” campaign since she joined the BDC team two years ago:

“We’ve wanted to move the campaign to be more reflective of our community,” she said. “So we have changed from the individuals that we highlight in our campaign to be reflective. The past two years we’ve focused more on individuals, minority, Black neighbors, Latinx. We’ve been pushing more and more to tell the stories of the individuals that are here.”

Campaign materials started going out in Spanish as well as English in 2020, she said, adding that the BDC was working with Spanish-language broadcast station Univision on a series of pieces spotlighting “our community throughout the summer.”

Print marketing campaign materials have gone to Brookfield, Oak Park, Riverside and North Riverside, Corona Owens said, and print ads also have been published.

“One of the things that we’ve seen is that we have residents that move in or even people who have lived her that have said ‘I never knew we had a crepe place.’ Well then, we must not be doing something right. We want to make sure you know we have a crepe place. We want to make sure you know we have a supermercado that’s down the street and you can walk there as opposed to drive there,” Corona Owens told the council.

“One of the driving forces for this campaign is to start locally and work our way out, as opposed to what we’ve been doing, which was to start out and work our way in,” she said.

In a quasi-related vote, the council approved the BDC recommendation that the Berwyn rejoin Visit Oak Park, which is the officially state-sanctioned visitor’s bureau of Oak Park and 18 other nearby communities, Berwyn among them.

Membership in the bureau will allow Berwyn to access state-sanctioned marketing campaigns aimed at boosting tourism.

“As the our nation moves toward reopening, it will be key to have the support of our local CVB to garner attention from visitors throughout the state and beyond,” according to a March 19 memo to the council from Hulseberg.

“The state of Illinois has a formula in place that automatically earmarks dollars for each community to be used to market themselves as a destination location. By becoming a part of Oak Park’s service area, Berwyn will be able to benefit from a portion of the hotel/motel and food/beverage taxes collected from its area by the state.”

Berwyn let its membership in the bureau lapse in 2009, Corona Owens said.