Four years ago, two people from the national-media world drove out into the desert with their nervous rescue terrier on their lap. One of them was vividly pregnant with their son. They signed their lives over to become the new owners of San Diego’s iconic local media company.
That was us.
Today we launch another part of our storytelling dream—Here We Are, San Diego’s creative studio. We help local brands build their own stories, find their voice, find their people, find the place they belong in the city. We also help global brands coming into San Diego understand the culture of here, find their place in it, and connect with an audience who relates and gives a damn.
And we have the great fortune to do it with one of the most accomplished and likeable talents in the industry—Megan Grable, the creative director who helped build award-winning agency Bulldog Drummond from the ground up. For 20 years, Megan worked with some of the world’s top brands—Nike, Hilton, Diageo, Adidas, Starbucks, KFC, Mattel, KIND, you name it—to find and tell their most compelling stories. She also helped a bunch of local indies grow out of garages.
We took over this 77-year-old media company and modernized it because we deeply believe in San Diego. It’s where we live and belong. We believe with an old-fashioned fervor in the power and responsibility of media to translate, capture, and help build the culture of a city. To find the people doing remarkable things, and tell their stories in ways that gives people an emotional thwack, or a chuckle so good they remember who did it to them. We wanted to tell stories in ways that make a deeper impact and a lasting memory—especially in the single-use media era.
Why a creative studio? A few reasons.
First, our goal was never just to save an iconic magazine. It was to build something bigger that connects people, entrepreneurs, and communities through shared experiences. Launching a massive festival (Del Mar Wine + Food) was part of that mission.
Here We Are is the next step.
In our first couple of years as stewards of San Diego Mag, we took what we’d learned at national media—Claire at NBC/Comcast, Troy at Food Network—and applied it to the stories of where we live. As we did, a handful of brands—big and small—came to us and said, “Hey, we like the way you do that, can you tell our story that way?”
To be transparent, not everyone loves the way we story. Our childhood English teachers have many ulcers. But some people reacted very positively. We won some national awards—for writing, video, voiceovers, art—which was incredibly cool for us.
Obviously the journalism side of our house could not become a branding studio. But we could take our same storytelling manifesto (we have a very long and obsessive document that details how we creatively wheatpaste stories together). Hire some of the best creatives we know and tell brands’ stories in our style.
Then we could help those brands integrate into the community around San Diego Magazine—through the mag, social, events, podcasts, newsletters, web—in a real, meaningful, genuine, transparent way.
To give Here We Are real cred, we knew we had to bring in a pro—someone who knew the creative studio/agency world tip to tail, and also gave a damn about San Diego, spoke its tongue.
We just had no idea we’d find the woman who helped brand some of the biggest and pickiest and coolest brands on the planet. That part was real luck. But it was also because Megan could feel what we were trying to do with everything surrounding SDM. We’re building belonging, and working every day to raise the culture of the city.
PARTNER CONTENT
So that’s what Here We Are will do. It’ll help dreamers and tinkerers and idea-ers find their belonging. It all goes back to people. Every brand you love is just someone’s dream well-told. And good branding isn’t about rising above, it’s about rising to the right place.
Whenever someone tells their story—how and why they got to this moment in time—they often end with the phrase, “and here we are.” A pretty universal expression that suggests the rest of the story is about to be written.
