Living in the heart of New Orleans, Peter Mayer Advertising is steeped in culture.  

“Our connection to the culture of our hometown is the foundation of our creativity, and it defines the agency,” running through everything it does both professionally and personally, Peter Mayer says, from a culture-focused Slack channel to an annual crawfish boil.

It was an agency “culture tagging” exercise, in fact, that inspired a Peter Mayer campaign far from home for Florida’s Kennedy Space Center. The Center was experiencing an attendance problem in the wake of NASA retiring the space shuttle program in 2011. To show visitors why the KSC (about 40 miles outside Orlando) is still worth a visit, the agency played off the insight that consumers are always heads-down in their smartphones to create “Look Up.” As the shop puts it: “We’re living in our own self-contained worlds, faces glued to the little screens on our smartphones—and missing the bigger picture. But when we see the wonder of space up close, we experience an awakening—proof that incredible things happen when people look up.”

Things are, in fact, looking up for the client: the campaign boosted the space center’s attendance by 50 percent.