Episode 187 · June 13, 2025 · with Kelly Campbell & Michaela Palevic
Recurring Themed Nights Beat a One-Off Party Every Time
Kelly Campbell and Michaela Palevic of Westside Motor Lounge on sponsorship activation, why a two-acre venue built its calendar around repeat events instead of one-off promotions, and how Atlanta’s going-out habits are shifting.
The episode
Westside Motor Lounge sits on roughly two acres off English Avenue: a courtyard stage, indoor-outdoor space wrapped by three buildings, and a covered vinyl-only DJ room called Echo Room that runs Thursday through Saturday nights. Kelly Campbell and Michaela Palevic joined Nick Constantino to walk through how the venue built its marketing around that space rather than chasing whatever was trending that month.
Both guests came up on different sides of the same industry. Palevic started in social media and PR at Concentrix in 2008, right as brands first realized a Facebook page was worth having, and later ran her own agency before helping manage the Atlanta Food & Wine Festival’s social presence. Campbell has worked sponsorship activation since 1997, moving from writing sponsorship deals to managing the agencies executing them for Coca-Cola, then to the property side at Atlanta Food & Wine Festival, so he has seen a sponsorship negotiated, sold and activated from every angle.
That range showed up in their diagnosis of what most sponsorships get wrong: budgeting for the placement and forgetting the activation. A logo on a building or a naming-rights deal means nothing to someone who doesn’t already know the brand; it takes real amplification dollars, roughly matching the sponsorship spend, to make the asset land. The second failure is not agreeing on what success looks like before the deal is signed, so KPIs get invented after the fact by whichever side is unhappy with the result.
Westside applied the lesson by building its calendar around recurring, themed events instead of one-off promotions: a monthly night called Skip Day, a weekly Sunday series, a family-oriented afternoon called Mother May I, and a 45-and-up gathering. Partnering with promoters who already have a built-in following, and calling them business partners rather than vendors, let the venue tap new audiences repeatedly instead of fishing in the same pond every time. The strategy took roughly three years to find its groove, time most single-location restaurants don’t have, but it turned Westside into a venue people already have circled on their calendar before deciding what else to do that night.
“They forget the activation part. They only budget for the sponsorship, and then they're stuck with a gigantic billboard or an asset that requires additional amplification they never planned for.”
Kelly Campbell
What to take from it
- The most common sponsorship failure is budgeting for the placement and forgetting the activation dollars needed to make it land with an audience.
- Agree on what success looks like, and set KPIs, before the sponsorship is signed, not after results disappoint one side.
- Recurring, themed events built with the same promoters outperform booking a different one-off event every weekend.
- Calling partners “business partners” rather than vendors changes the tenor of the relationship and what both sides are willing to do beyond the contract.
- Building a venue’s identity around a niche, like an all-vinyl DJ room, filters in a more musically eclectic and engaged crowd than an auto-synced digital DJ set.
- Westside’s core audience trends 30s and urban, people who chose to live somewhere walkable, which shapes both programming and pricing.
- A strategy like this takes years, not months, to find its groove, which most single-location restaurants and bars don’t have the runway to do.
“The language we use is business partner. We really call our partners business partners, because it is a business, and they're just as excited about the space and the possibilities as we are.”
Michaela Palevic
In their words
“When you invest a lot in one-off and it fails, you're screwed. When you invest with the vision of the future, it takes time for things to really get into their groove, and getting into that groove is hugely important.”
Nick Constantino
“KPIs seem to always come up after the fact. When you establish what success looks like from the beginning, it's a lot easier to get there.”
Nick Constantino
“We really sought out promoters and partners who were like-minded and had music at the center of what they were doing, and we've repeated those relationships instead of doing a different event every weekend.”
Michaela Palevic
Questions this episode answers
The questions owners actually search for
What makes Westside Motor Lounge’s event marketing strategy different?
What’s the biggest mistake businesses make with sponsorships?
What is Echo Room?
Why do recurring events outperform one-off promotions for a venue?
How is nightlife behavior changing among younger patrons?
Full transcript6,150 words
Welcome to the Marketing MadMen, Nick Constantino here. I have with me Kelly Campbell and Michaela Palevic of Westside Motor Lounge. Let's set the stage of what a perfect Thursday afternoon at Westside looks like.
So we sit on about two acres over on English Avenue. Large courtyard, courtyard stage, large garage doors, indoor-outdoor space, three buildings surrounding the courtyard. Music throughout, drinks flowing, live, local, different genres.
We have a vinyl lounge, DJs playing Thursday, Friday and Saturday night, from our space called Echo Room. All vinyl.
I used to DJ on vinyl as a kid growing up in New York, and Serato came out and started auto-matching the beats, and it kind of destroyed the concept of the DJ. So I appreciate that it's vinyl, because you're forced to get more eclectic with your music, going down into the 70s and disco and R&B rabbit holes. Michaela, let's start with you, talk about how you got into marketing and what brought you here.
I graduated in '08, when no one could get a job, and found an internship with Concentrix. They hired me on in the marketing and PR department, and that was right when social media first blossomed for businesses, restaurants could make pages and everybody wanted to do it. It turned into a whole other job position. Eventually I left and started my own social media management company, Hello Media Company, and Kelly and I got connected through the Atlanta Food and Wine Festival before reconnecting through Westside.
PR is one of the most misunderstood things in marketing. Advertisers want free advertisement from PR, and the good companies never give that, so you get the crappy remnant inventory left over. Kelly, catch us up, what's your background?
I moved to Atlanta in '97, just post-Olympics, and got involved in the sponsorship world, really focused on sports and entertainment. That was the young phase of the industry, you had naming rights and a couple sponsorships but no dedicated staff and no real on-field activation. I did a lot of work with Coke, then Live Nation, then went back to Coke for a couple of years managing the agencies on their roster activating sponsorships. Then I went to the property side at Atlanta Food and Wine Festival, so I've had all three sides: agency, corporate and property.
So having seen it from three sides, what's the number one thing people get wrong when they negotiate or sign a sponsorship?
They don't realize it takes additional resources to activate the sponsorship. If you put a sign on a building, all you have is a billboard, and nobody from out of town even knows what the brand is unless the activation dollars roughly match the sponsorship dollars. That's the biggest failure, they only budget for the sponsorship, then they're stuck with a gigantic asset that needs additional amplification they never planned for.
And really knowing what success looks like in that activation, collecting data, understanding how you're interacting with people and how you get a return on the investment.
KPIs always seem to come up after the fact. When you establish them from the beginning, it's easier to get there, but the people doing the sponsorship often aren't educated enough in the industry to do it, and the people selling it just want the big check.
Let's get into how you're applying those principles at Westside. Michaela, what are you doing differently here versus your previous PR and social media gigs?
Our social media strategy relies a lot on collaboration, either with brands or the promoters and event organizers we work with, making sure our strategy is genuinely collaborative rather than just saying the word.
We're on year three now, and we evolved our event strategy so we're not doing a different event every weekend. We really sought out promoters and partners who were like-minded, with music at the center of what they were doing, and built a series of recurring events: a monthly one called Skip Day, a weekly Sunday series, a family-focused event called Mother May I, and a 45-and-up night called Kicking It Up. Repeating and tapping into those existing networks is where the real growth in followers and engagement has come from.
The language you use is business partner, not vendor.
Exactly, we really call our partners business partners, because it is a business, and they're just as excited about the space and the possibilities as we are.
When you invest a lot in one-off and it fails, you're screwed. When you invest with a longer-term vision, it takes time for the audience to really get into its groove, which is hugely important, and it also makes future sponsorship easier, because the natural cause of the event tells you which sponsor actually fits.
We're not really data-driven, honestly, it's partnerships and gut feelings, but from the sponsorship side we do have a lot of data to share with potential sponsors on where an event started, where it's gone and where it's going.
Let's talk about running the business day to day, margins, staffing, how you think about pricing.
Part of the strategy is finding partnerships where we're scheduled out months in advance, which makes it easier to plan labor and cost of goods around events we already know what they'll deliver.
If you're not in marketing with the sales and operations people, your bartenders and servers, you're screwed, because you have to understand where you actually make the most money before you put marketing dollars behind it.
We know Thursday, Friday, Saturday are our biggest days, so we've pushed hard to book events on the calendar as far out as we can, which lets us pivot and try to build programming on the slower nights like Wednesday.
Let's talk about kids these days. Consumption is down across the industry. What are you seeing at Westside?
Our crowd definitely trends toward its 30s, urban dwellers who live in the city for a reason. They're enjoying themselves, people-watching, but not getting crazy.
For us, having those themed events means we see the traffic and the engagement, but we do trend a little older.
Talk about the music. What kind of bands do you book for the themed nights?
We just had our second year of a festival called Mental Awakening Jam, about 1,500 people, leaning into jam bands. We also just started a Thursday-night blues series called Soul Symphony.
I'm dying to see more intimate venues make a comeback, 150-person rooms instead of $44-hot-dog festivals. If you had one band that could come play for 150 people at Westside, who would it be?
I'm going to say the Black Crowes. They played with Jimmy Page recently, and I saw them a couple years ago at the Fox, just a great show.
For me, growing up in Georgia, the jam-band scene was always big, so I'd go with the original Widespread Panic lineup.
Give people your website and Instagram.
It's westsidemotorlounge.com, and Instagram is West side underscore motor underscore lounge.
What's your go-to on the menu?
The smash burger, and drink-wise the Pink Cadillac Margarita.
Love it. You've been listening to the Marketing MadMen, we'll catch you next week.
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