Recognizing the economical and growth opportunities for Atlanta imminent with the boom in technological advancements and increase in early-stage companies, the Metro Atlanta Chamber of Commerce (MACOC) established “Industries of the Mind” (IOM) in 1999, a five-year economic development campaign. One year into the campaign, MACOC tapped Duffey Communications to increase exposure of IOM and spread the message of Atlanta as a ‘proven place for technology’.

To combat Atlanta's perception of not being a technology hub Duffey created a technology steering committee of key Atlanta business and technology leaders to serve as IOM consultants. Duffey held a creative session with leaders of the Metro Atlanta Chamber of Commerce to hone IOM messaging and initiate a grassroots campaign for IT talent recruitment. Utilizing the messaging from the creative session, Duffey produced a message booklet communicating the goals for IOM and organized meetings to foster communication among the existing technology community and planned luncheons for newcomers to Atlanta in the technology industry.

Duffey employed grassroots outreach techniques to promote AtlantaSmartCity.com among the audience of potential employees, offering them the opportunity to learn more about Atlanta’s lifestyle and technology companies. To date, the IOM campaign has resulted in 32,362,304 media impressions, with an ad equivalent of $756,000. Based on ad value alone, the ROI for this program is 202 percent. Eighty-one media placements, including the following highlights: Wall Street Journal, The Boston Globe, Newsweek, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Atlanta Business Chronicle, CIO, Business 2.0, Competitive Edge, Computerworld, IT Career World, Entrepreneur's Start-Ups, HR Executive, BLTAtlanta.com (Business, Law, Technology Atlanta), NPR’s Morning Edition and more.

As a result of this campaign, the Atlanta SmartCity.com Web site now averages 1 million hits per month, an increase of 900 percent.