Just wanted to share this little gem with you all. We just recently had this piece written about us by Adotas.com, which is an internet advertising and media news site.
I'll copy the whole article below but I encourage you to check the article out HERE.
Catalyst:SF, a ‘marketing capital’ firm
Written on February 12th 2009
Author by George H. Simpson
ADOTAS — Catalyst:SF was founded in 2007 by John Durham and Cory Treffiletti, who together, have nearly 40 years of marketing and sales experience, much of it in the digital media industry. The company calls itself a “Marketing Capital” firm that helps clients combine selling a product or service (Marketing) with sources of profit or benefit vs. the competition (Capital) to produce ideas, intelligence and insights that achieve an advantage in the areas of marketing, sales or consumer insights. We asked the privately-held San Francisco-based company to tell us more about itself. Here are John Durham’s answers.
Catalyst:SF is not an ad agency, not a consulting firm. Exactly what is it you do?
Catalyst:SF delivers mission critical intelligence to the intersection of Madison Ave. and Silicon Valley through marketing and sales services. Our core business is strategy and execution for brands, start-ups, publishers and agencies who are looking to utilize new media for the success of their core business metrics and we support that core business making sure that business gets done efficiently.
We’re a different kind of agency; one that can work with all the different players in digital media. We have a team with deep experience from both sides of the coin (agencies/brands and publishers/technology) and in all sorts of categories and we apply our knowledge and expertise to achieving results. We have a theory for how an agency should be structured and how it should be compensated and this company is proof of that concept.
Rather than being paid for what agencies do best, which is spend money, we get paid for strategy and incentivized on performance. Our strategy starts with the tools and services that are available in the marketplace and a deep understanding of how the target uses these tools. The last thing we do is try to spend money, so most of our clients are pretty happy about that! There are a lot of ways to reach an audience and convey a message that are not dependent on a paid media placement.
Can you give me a few examples of how you have helped start up companies?
Over the last year and a half we’ve helped a number of start-ups and emerging publishers to properly position themselves in the marketplace and either launch effectively or drive growth against a set of measurable business objectives. In some cases, with very early stage start-ups, we developed positioning and messaging and created a launch strategy to get them into the marketplace. For other companies who are farther along in their growth cycles who came to us with a set of positioning and a business model, we developed their outreach and customer acquisition efforts and managed the execution to help them hit their needs for growth.
A few examples of some of our successes over the last year and a half:
- Freewheel.tv: Freewheel came to us post Seed funding and we launched them into the marketplace as their outsourced marketing department, managing all messaging, including their PR strategy, website and sales materials. Since their launch and through our combined efforts in their first year, Freewheel has successfully become the leader in advanced advertising and monetization management for online video, working with a who’s who of the online video category.
- Kenshoo: Kenshoo was an established SEM management tool in the UK and they worked with us to revise their positioning and messaging for US introduction with initial meetings at US agency leaders. As a result of these and additional efforts, Kenshoo has quickly assumed a position of leadership for intelligent campaign automation in SEM.
- Sportgenic: Our team managed a series of events that featured the roll-out of a new name and logo while increasing awareness and generating leads for the targeted, vertical media company. Our efforts resulted in dramatic approval from brands and agencies alike.
- Brightroll: Catalyst:SF developed and executed a national road-show that resulted in direct, highly impactful exposure to more than 180 brand and agency representatives at a senior level, opening markets and continuing its growth as the leader in online video.
How do you measure your success?
Our success is measured very simply; by sales, market share and revenue. It is our philosophy, after having spent the last 15 years on digital strategy, that marketing dollars are only spent to increase sales, market share and revenue. We identify the objectives of the business and apply a proprietary Behavioral Planning process that takes into account the responsibility of media and the power of messaging to create strategies that are rooted in fundamental marketing principles.
The “SF” in our name is a reminder of that methodology; strategy and fundamentals. Too many companies attempt to create strategy that forgets the fundamentals. Too many people try to be “innovative” for the sake of innovation, but we believe that you need a mix of what has worked in the past and what may work in the future in order to be efficient with your money and responsible for your business. If you aren’t measuring the ROI for your dollars, how else can you possibly measure success?
Give me a short history of the company.
The company’s genesis was back in 2004 when Cory and I worked together at Carat Fusion, the interactive arm of Carat USA. Each of us have always been intrigued and involved in emerging media, dating back to our various roles in interactive as far back as 1994 and 1995. In 2005 we started thinking about finding new ways to build the marketing paradigm and focus our attention against emerging media and innovative publishers. In 2007 we decided after having left Carat and done stints with a couple of companies to formally pursue the idea for a Marketing Capital Firm.
The idea was to provide marketing services to venture-backed companies and continue to build expertise within these formats, thereby honing our expertise in these vehicles and being able to provide that experience for brands. We build the team, created the model and have been successful since then!
We are all entrepreneurial at heart and we like working as a catalyst for business between Silicon Valley and Madison Avenue. We like translating these two languages for one another and our relationships and our network of contacts have benefitted by being tuned in to what’s new and what’s working. Everyone seems to benefit and everyone learns. We firmly believe in the concept that all ships rise with the tide and we want to do our part to make sure that the tide is high!
What have you got in the works coming up in the next six months?
Over the next 6 months we are looking to launch some new services that will make it even more efficient to drive users and build a customer base for start-ups that provide a real solution to a real challenge in the marketplace. We are also looking to work with more brands and more publishers at the intersections of their business to provide solutions that go beyond advertising and paying for placement. We want to get into the nitty gritty of how you weave your brand into the actual experience of the web, thereby becoming more than a marketer and more of an integrated solution. We could explain exactly how to do that, but then where would our competitive edge reside?
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