Old City Creative Corridor: digital media shop Maiden Media convenes collaboration tomorrow

As new neighborhoods in Philadelphia find blossoming creative scenes, it takes real community building to continue to develop those connections, even if you’re the original.
Decades after first re-blossoming (again), Old City has a new group, website and call to action to grow and connect its community of creativity. The second meeting of the Old City Creative Corridor, convened by digital media agency Maiden Media, will take place tomorrow, Wednesday, March 16 at 6:30 p.m. in the CitiBank in Society Hill at 207 South Street. Meetings will be held the third Wednesday of each month. [RSVP here]
Last month, more than 40 people attended the meeting, said Maiden PR lead Dan Schwartz, including a couple dozen business owners, freelancers and students. Indy Hall, the Old City Civic Association, the Old City District, the Old City Business Collective and others were represented, Schwartz said.

“We want to brand Old City as the Creative Corridor because Old City is the hub of Philadelphia’s creative businesses and talent,” said Schwartz, of the various Old City groups attending. “We are hoping that involvement will come from the Greater Philadelphia Region and that we can unite the Philadelphia creative industry through the Old City Creative Corridor.”
Formed by four high school friends with backgrounds in marketing, computer programming and the like, Maiden Media launched in October 2009. The company, which now has six full-time employees and three part-timers, started in Princeton, near where they grew up together, but moved their lives and their business to Old City in July 2010.
“We understood that we needed to move to a big city to develop the type of portfolio and relationships we need to grow to begin working with bigger brands. We looked into Boston, New York, Washington D.C. and Philadelphia. Our considerations were based around access to young talent — amount of quality universities with good communications and design schools– access to networking events, cost of life and rent, market competition and saturation and size of the overall creative community,” said Schwartz, who grew up with the founders and came on full-time not long after they launched. “We decided that Philadelphia was the perfect fit and Old City the perfect community.”