Straight answers
Extra Medium is a marketing agency in Chicago, and social is where the city talks back. We plan content around how Chicago actually lives, its neighborhoods, teams and food arguments, and we put local creators in the work through Magpie, our own local creator platform. Less broadcasting, more belonging.
Chicago can smell a generic post from a mile off. The city runs on specifics: which side of the Sox-Cubs line you stand on, the correct order of an Italian beef, neighborhoods with their own accents and loyalties, a summer festival season that takes over the calendar. Social content that works here is built from that material, planned around the city’s real year — the river turning green, the first warm day everyone loses their mind, the long winter that moves life indoors and online. Stock content with a skyline photo pasted on is not a strategy; it’s a tell.
The most trusted voices in any Chicago neighborhood are the people who live there and post like it. That’s why we built Magpie, our local creator platform, in Extra Medium Labs: it connects businesses with local creators whose audiences are actually local, and shows each creator’s local reach before anyone books. For Chicago brands that means creator and influencer work built on real neighborhood audiences instead of follower counts inflated by people three time zones away.
Social fails when it’s a pile of posts and works when it’s a calendar: the city’s moments mapped in advance, a steady rhythm of original content between them, and paid support behind the pieces that earn it. We run social as part of the wider growth system, so the audience built on social is the same audience search, email and creators are working on. One audience, one strategy, several doors in.
Key takeaways
Yes, and we built the platform for it. Magpie, from our own lab, matches businesses with local creators and shows each creator’s local reach up front, so a neighborhood restaurant or retailer can book people whose followers are genuinely nearby.
The ones your customers already use, which for most local brands means Instagram and TikTok first, with LinkedIn carrying the B2B side. We’d rather run two platforms with a real point of view than five with a posting schedule and no pulse.
In writing, through the contact page. Tell us the brand and the neighborhoods that matter. We’ll come back with what we’d post, who we’d put in it, and what we’d stop doing.
Let’s talk
Don’t know exactly what you need? Good. That’s our job. Tell us where the business is headed and we’ll tell you honestly whether we can help — and if we can’t, who might.
Usually replies within one business day.
