Amazon HQ2
A two-week sprint across Riverside County—data, graphics, and a full RFP offering package to put the region on Amazon’s HQ2 shortlist.
Gold Addy Award Winner
American Advertising Awards
The opportunity
In September 2017, Amazon opened its search for HQ2—a second North American headquarters equal to Seattle, with more than $5 billion in planned construction investment and as many as 50,000 high-paying jobs. Communities across the continent had weeks—not months—to respond to Amazon’s Request for Proposal.
Riverside County mobilized a coalition of cities, agencies, and economic-development partners to compete. The goal: assemble a credible, compelling submission that would earn Riverside County a place on Amazon’s list of prospective sites.
What Amazon was offering
Jeff Bezos called HQ2 “a full equal” to Seattle. The scale of the RFP set the bar for every response.
The challenge
This wasn’t a single-client brand refresh—it was a county-wide coordination effort with an immovable deadline. Dozens of stakeholders needed to align on data, messaging, and visuals while Amazon’s RFP window stayed open.
- Two weeks — from kickoff to final submission, with no room to slip the RFP timeline.
- Many communities, one voice — cities and agencies across Riverside County contributing site data, workforce stats, and local incentives into a unified story.
- Data at scale — labor pools, real estate options, transportation, education pipelines, and quality-of-life proof points had to be collected, verified, and visualized fast.
- Print-ready at enterprise quality — Amazon expected a polished offering package, not a slide deck stapled together at the last minute.
The two-week sprint
Geogram embedded with the county coalition as creative and production lead—turning raw inputs from multiple jurisdictions into a single, submission-ready package.
Data intake & synthesis
Gathered workforce, real-estate, incentive, and infrastructure data from communities across the county—and structured it for Amazon’s RFP criteria.
Graphics & visualization
Designed charts, maps, and campaign visuals—including the SEA→HQ2 Riverside County identity—that made a complex regional story scannable in seconds.
Offering package & brochure
Produced a 106-page, oversized print brochure—11×17″ trim, 11×34″ open spreads—delivered print-ready to Amazon under deadline pressure.
Stakeholder coordination
Worked across economic-development, government, and community partners so every contributor’s material landed in one cohesive submission.
What we built
Geogram’s role spanned strategy, creative, and production—the full stack needed when a region has fourteen days to look like a billion-dollar bet.
- 106-page print brochure — oversized 11×17″ format with 11×34″ double-page spreads, printed and hand-delivered as Riverside County’s formal HQ2 offering package.
- Economic & workforce graphics — data visualizations translating regional statistics into Amazon’s language of investment and growth.
- Campaign identity — “Welcome to Riverside County” creative system tying the HQ2 bid to a memorable, confident regional brand.
- Multi-jurisdiction alignment — templates, asset standards, and production workflows so disparate communities shipped on the same deadline.
Connectivity & housing
The brochure made the case that Riverside Metro could support Amazon’s scale—with regional transportation, daily flights, population growth, and housing capacity to match.
Quality of life
A full chapter of the offering package sold the lifestyle—mountains, coast, desert, wine country, sports, and trails—all within reach of HQ2.
The result
Riverside County entered the HQ2 race with a printed 106-page offering package that matched the ambition of Amazon’s ask—a coordinated regional brochure, not a patchwork of city PDFs. Geogram’s sprint work helped the county present itself as a serious contender for one of the largest corporate relocations in modern history.
The project earned a Gold Addy Award from the American Advertising Awards—and remains a benchmark for how Geogram operates under extreme timelines with multiple stakeholders and zero margin for error.
