Today, we’re announcing Online Optimism’s expansion to Atlanta, Georgia. With our long-time Social Media Director, Taylor Kincaid, leading this second office, we are proudly bringing a bit of Optimism to our new space at Ponce City Market in the Old Fourth Ward.

For our clients, followers, and all of New Orleans: thank you for the growth you’ve helped us achieve. Expanding our presence to new regions is the key to crafting more creative, innovative, and exceptional design and marketing work for you. We’re confident that growing outside this city will pay dividends locally, so to speak.

For those we’re about to meet in Atlanta: we can’t wait to connect with new designers, new marketers, and build a new community with you. Engaging with your city hasn’t happened simply by chance. It’s the result of nearly a decade of dedication to drawing together a talented team in the Southeast and bringing a better place to work (and to work with) to a broader community.

Building A Second Home for Our Optimists

We hire staff with an entrepreneurial mindset and find those who want to hustle to accomplish our vision—be the marketing agency that organizations want to work with and people aspire to work for. We are confident that expanding to Atlanta is the best way to reach that ideal. 

Still, facing COVID-19, it’s worth discussing why we believe that physical offices in new cities are our best path toward growth.

If you aren’t familiar with our company values, two in particular end up expressing our feelings about having a physical presence. 

• Value #4: Screens Will Not Replace Handshakes
• Value #6: Better Our Community

While COVID-19 has impacted us as much as any other company, it reinforced what we’re doing right. There is great value in our ability to connect through screens. Still, our people-first ideology encourages us to continually seek community through support of one another and involvement in the world around us. 

We want to create a place for our staff to team up on campaigns, collaborate with clients, and, of course, play with their office pups. The need for human interaction is an irreplaceable aspect of establishing personal connections; as such, this will be a crucial investment at our new location. There’s a combination of expertise, experience, and a lot of enthusiasm here at Online Optimism, but our greatest assets are the communities in which we root our relationships. 

With that in mind, we’re excited to bring our Donate, Elevate program to Atlanta.

For those unaware, Donate, Elevate is Online Optimism’s program to first 100% match any donations employees make to non-profits, and then put another 100% match toward an organization that our leadership chooses annually to support causes we find important.

For 2020, the non-profit organization in Atlanta that we’ve selected is the Georgia Innocence Project, an independent non-profit organization that corrects and prevents wrongful convictions in Georgia. Taylor donated $500 and Online Optimism donated, then elevated that to a $1,500 total donation. This is only the beginning. From our work in New Orleans, we learned that our agency’s economic impact has to come from us as a community partner. We’re excited to listen, learn, and use more than just dollars to make an impact in our new community. 

More Than the Busiest Airport in the World

We chose Atlanta as a location to open our second office because of its thriving, exciting, and irreplicable culture. This is a city full of passionate creatives, talented workers, and outstanding companies. 

It’s also a good place if you’re looking for big competition, which goes hand in hand with potential opportunities. Atlanta’s metro area has a GDP of $397 billion and one of the highest concentrations of Fortune 500 company headquarters of any city in the U.S. 

Our team, and our leadership, is chomping at the bit to take on these more significant challenges. 

We’re certainly not starting from scratch in Atlanta. Our client base already extends past Louisiana, throughout the Southeast region and East Coast of the United States.

We are eager to make new business alliances and gain more Optimists in the process. For a creative, innovative agency, Atlanta has a strong talent pool with over a quarter of a million students at 70 colleges and universities in the Metro area. We hope to become a staple in the Atlanta job market, facilitating new opportunities for creatives to blossom in their careers. After all, going from a recent college graduate to launching a second office in under five years is Taylor’s story.

Our Forerunner in Atlanta, Taylor

Optimism encouraged us to pursue expansion, but it’s our unyielding trust in Taylor’s ability to pilot the plane in this new region that inspired us to set up shop. She launched her career at Online Optimism out of our Specialist program, rose up the ranks from Strategist to Director, and has since quadrupled the size of our Social Media department. She has led as Account Executive on several of our largest accounts, managing hundreds of thousands of social media spend. She’s drafted beautifully written posts, handled social media crises, researched hashtags, adjusted to altered algorithms, and explained TikTok over and over again. 

Taylor’s most telltale award, as silly as it may have seemed at the time, was her 2018 OOie (our annual awards) for “Leading us in Leadership.” There’s no one better positioned than Taylor to build out a second office.

Eight Years WORKING Toward This Moment

On a personal, unprofessionally written note: I’m so darn excited to finally announce this.

This is the culmination of years of planning, talking, and working on the best path to take our agency to the next level. I’m so grateful to the many folks I’ve spoken to about the challenges and opportunities that come from regional expansion, alongside several business organizations (particularly the New Orleans Chamber of Commerce, the Delgado chapter of Goldman Sachs 10,000 Small Businesses, and the hard-working staff at Louisiana Economic Development) that offered countless resources for support. I’ll also be forever in debt to the many organizations like The Ehrhardt Group and Stay Local that put their trust in me when I was starting out. It’s a favor I look to return to those after me, over and over again.

Planting Magnolias and Peach Trees 

Our agency’s growth in both cities means more talent, more jobs, and more revenue. The Online Optimism headquarters will still be located in the Irish Channel, here in New Orleans, regardless of where we grow.

Yes, there will be more growth. This might be the first major expansion of our agency, but it’s already planned not to be the last. You’ll want to keep an eye on this space.

On a final note: showing appreciation for our staff is one of the most important things we do at Online Optimism. Showing appreciation for those that support us in this goal feels the same. Thank you to everyone reading for all your support these last eight years. Our agency couldn’t have taken this leap without you.

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If you’re in Atlanta or know someone in Atlanta that could use some exceptional marketing or design: give Taylor a call at 404-800-7240 or stop by Ponce City Market. She can’t wait to talk with you.