Whether its creating a viral, celeb-driven hashtag campaign for the Foundation Fighting Blindness, a VR film for Alzheimer’s Research UK simulating life with dementia, and securing powerful speakers like Bill Nye, Ru Paul, Justin Baldoni and Stacey London for music festivals, CatalystCreative, an experiential marketing firm specializes in fusing education with events.
Founder/CEO Amanda Slavin started the company at 26 after a meet-cute with her now-business partner Zappos’ Tony Hsieh. Five years later, she’s been named to Forbes 30 Under 30 and the Levo 100 and worked with brands like W Hotels, NPR, Coca-Cola and more to foster deeper engagement with their millennial audiences.
DIVERGE spoke to Slavin to find out more:
Why and how did you start CatalystCreativ?
Before I founded CatalystCreativ I was an elementary school teacher, but my creative mind didn’t love the bureaucracy of teaching and small classroom. I left teaching to start planning events in NYC. I liked engaging young people around an event and a brand, and I realized that this quality could be harnessed for good.
This growing need to create experiences that hold impact and inspiration in the world came from this job. CatalystCreativ’s first client was the Downtown Project in Las Vegas where we held Catalyst Week, a four-day intimate experience that helped people learn about the Downtown Project and hear from a curated group of speakers. Once I started holding these events, I couldn’t stop. I knew I found my place and CatalystCreativ found its purpose.
How is marketing to millennials different from other generations?
Marketing to millennial minded people is different from other generations because a simple commercial or print advertisement no longer suffices for millennials. We have coined the term ‘millennial minded’ as we believe that millennials are more of a psychographic than a demographic. Millennial minded individuals crave meaning. And they crave unique experiences that differ from what has been available to them. We worked with a team of incredible creatives to craft the Year of the Elephant #JoinTheHerd campaign for WildAid. We created an individualized experience which allowed for each and every person to connect with elephants in a way that made it personalized to them. This was done through a widget, influencer engagement, a microsite, and a Call to Action that was simple and easy to digest.
How do you create experiences to engage younger audiences?
Younger audiences are constantly bombarded with advertisements and media sources. The average person comes in contact with hundreds of advertisements per day. In a world that is overcrowded with advertisements, it is important that brands create emotional relationships with their customers.
For a brand to continue to exist and hold meaning in an oversaturated world, we believe that it must develop experiences that connect the customer to the brand. We create these experiences by really understanding the brand, and developing in person and online experiences that reflect it. We want customers to love a brand so much that if the company closed its doors today, they would be up in arms.
A strong brand can’t be easily replaced. We work intimately with the Life Is Beautiful festival in downtown Las Vegas, curating the speaker series. The lineup has featured speakers such as Bill Nye and Shepard Fairey. When Bill Nye spoke, the space filled up to capacity and people who couldn’t get entrance stood outside and chanted his name. We did our job. When the experience disappeared for some people, they were up in arms. We created an emotional relationship between Life Is Beautiful and festival attendees by curating a lineup of speakers that resonated with millennials.
How does education factor in?
Education factors into CatalystCreativ in a huge and impactful way. We believe in empowering brands from within. This means that in order to have a meaningful and impactful brand, it must start with a strong internal brand and team. Often times a team is too close to their product or service, that they can’t see areas of weakness like an outsider can. This is where we come in. We facilitate a brand acupuncture, helping teams learn and grow from within, to better serve the external.
How do you keep these experiences fresh? Any new tools, techniques, trends in the space?
Keeping experiences new and innovative is definitely one of my favorite parts of Catalyst. One tool that I could not be more grateful for is the team that I work with. Everybody brings such fresh perspective to the group, challenging each other to think bigger and bolder. One of the tools we’ve recently used, and are really proud of, is virtual reality. In a campaign that we built with Foundation Fighting Blindness, we created a video that simulates how blindness changes vision. It is a really powerful tool that we believe has a lot of potential for telling the human story.
CatalystCreativ is a marketing agency for millennials, by millennials. How does your approach change for when you’re speaking to an older brand who wants to target this demographic?
We don’t speak to an older brand any different than we would talk to a younger brand — we speak from a place of genuine listening, which goes back to the idea of “millennial minded” vs millennial. Sometimes millennials can get a bad reputation for impatience, but we pride ourselves on our attention to each client. We understand that every company is different, and there isn’t a universal equation that works for everyone. The one tool that we always come back to is our powerful ability to listen and learn with each customer. And that doesn’t change if the client is a millennials or not.
What is your advice for others that want to get involved in your field?
Surround yourself with people who lift you up and help you grow. I’ve been so fortunate to have really wonderful friends and mentors to help me get to where I am. I have friends who are also my business peers, and they are able to see where I struggle and help me grow through it. I can’t overstress the power of empowering people. In this industry it helps to know people with a strong network, but it is even more helpful to know people who want to genuinely see you succeed.
What role does diversity play in your company? What about in your campaigns?
Since CatalystCreativ believes in freedom and flexibility, while we have memberships with WeWork, Soho House, and an office in Vegas, we believe in the opportunity to choose to work remote. This allows us to have a lot of diversity in location, network, and thought. Our team is located in Las Vegas, New York City, Philadelphia, Portland, and Raleigh. We have the whole country covered from the Pacific Northwest to the South covered. This also allows the network that we are so grateful for to be all over the country as well. We are within reach of all different types of customers and clients.
What are CatalystCreativ’s plans for the future?
Right now we have the strongest team dynamic that we’ve ever had. We’re about four and a half years old now, and we are emerging from the startup phase and we are in the process of solidifying what our identity is. We’ve undergone a lot of changes since we began. We work with brands to look inwards in order to better their outwards efforts, and right now we are doing the same with ourselves. So, our plan for the future is to continue to grow into a stronger and better brand to serve our customers. Stay tuned for our forthcoming rebrand. We are really excited about it.
