The Challenge

Detroit Foundation Hotel and The Apparatus Room had established identities, but their social presence no longer fully reflected the experience of the properties or the city around them. Existing content leaned heavily on polished, commercial-style shoots, leaving less room for the personality and spontaneity audiences expect from social. And as Detroit’s hospitality landscape continued to grow, the brands needed to renew their local relevance and give both Detroiters and visitors new reasons to experience the properties.

The Strategy

We refreshed the brands’ social strategy around a more immediate, people-driven approach to content while bringing Detroit itself further into the story. That strategy ultimately led to Late Checkout, a signature series designed to reconnect the properties with local culture and position them as places Detroiters actually spend time.

Brand Development

Before creating more content, we needed to clarify what that content should communicate. We revisited how Detroit Foundation Hotel and The Apparatus Room showed up as individual brands and as connected experiences, identifying the qualities that made each distinct while building a shared strategy around their relationship to Detroit.

That work gave us a clearer foundation for how the brands should look, sound, and behave on social: more relevant, more personality-driven, and more connected to the people and culture around them. From there, we could create content that didn't simply show the properties, but gave audiences a better sense of what it feels like to actually spend time there.

Digital Marketing

Our digital strategy started with foundational content. We built one overarching approach for Detroit Foundation Hotel and The Apparatus Room, then developed distinct content strategies around the experiences each brand offers. A steady mix of original photography and video captured the hotel, restaurant, menus, events, people, and everyday moments within each space, creating social channels that felt active, current, and reflective of the properties themselves.

Social Media Management + Content Creation

Rather than relying on highly produced shoots alone, we introduced a more social-first approach to content creation. Our team regularly captured photo and video designed specifically for the platforms where it would live, giving both brands a larger, more flexible library of content and more opportunities to show their personalities. The result was a social presence that felt less like a campaign and more like an ongoing view into what was actually happening at the properties.

Signature Series: Late Checkout

A few extra hours can tell you a lot about a city.

Late Checkout is our signature video series built around a simple idea: let Detroiters show you Detroit. Each feature invites a local artist, creative, tastemaker, or personality into Detroit Foundation Hotel and asks how they would spend a late checkout in the city, from where they would eat to where they would go and what makes Detroit feel like home to them.

Putting locals at the center serves a larger strategy. For Detroiters, the series brings the properties back into the rhythm of the city, positioning them as places to meet, eat, stay, and spend time even when you live a few miles away. For visitors, it offers something more valuable than a traditional travel guide: recommendations from the people who actually know the city.

By giving Detroiters the microphone, Late Checkout connects the properties to the culture happening beyond their doors while making them part of that culture, too.

Project Notes

Hospitality marketing can easily become focused on selling the destination to people outside of it. This project reminded us that sometimes the strongest way to reach visitors is to start with the people who already live there.

Late Checkout gave us a way to market Detroit Foundation Hotel and The Apparatus Room through the people who know Detroit best. By building local relevance first, we created content that gives Detroiters a reason to see the properties differently and gives visitors a more credible, personal introduction to the city.