Catalyst 2010

Catalyst Direct has rebranded their 20-year old agency and built a new marketing agency model seamlessly linking digital with direct, analytics with data and deep customer insight with actionable strategy. The agency has been rebranded as Catalyst (sans Direct) and is paired with the tagline, Science + Soul, reflecting their emphasis on the synergy achieved through analytical thinking coupled with insight. The agency has undergone a massive restructuring to embed digital strategy and data-driven analytics across the organization, enabling everyone in the organization to focus on optimizing strategy. The benefit to clients is: a more effective framework to generate better strategy; eliminating silos that inhibit idea generation; and improved outcomes.

The creative department now reports to Peter Platt, recently hired Chief Digital Officer, resulting in digital strategy integrated in all services. The agency has restructured to free account leads from time-consuming process by adding client project managers tasked with centralized orchestration of activities. The account teams can now focus more exclusively on insight gathering and strategy development vs. managing process. Lastly, data analysts will now infuse customer knowledge, behavior and insight into communications strategies, campaign analysis, web analytics, and client forward-planning. The end result for clients is optimized results across all channels: the agency of the future.

In addition to Peter Platt, a key new hire rounding out the new agency structure is Steve Khederian as Analytics Director, partnering and sharing the same title with veteran analytics guru Kevin Seaman. Khederian joins from Modern Marketing Concepts and is a 15-year veteran in the analytics space. Damir Saracevic was promoted to Director, Digital Marketing, from Director, Interactive Marketing. A robust new web site, www.catalystinc.com, has also been launched in support of the new brand.

 "We had always been primarily a direct marketing agency," Mike Osborn, founding partner, said. "But a few years ago, we looked out and saw the future.  A big piece of it was going to be digital, no question. But it was bigger than that. The agency of the future would need to be more than a digital agency, or a direct agency or an interactive agency. They would need to be able to optimize across all channels, online and offline, wherever the customer engaged.  They'd need to be able to marry customer insight with analytics, to think in 3-D. And so we became that agency. Seemed the right time to drop the Direct, and the association with traditional direct marketing, from our brand."

To cement their rebranding, Catalyst brought in the best minds in the business, including global strategic consultants The Winterberry Group (www.winterberrygroup.com) and Robert Fronk, a Catalyst board member and leading strategy advisor.  Catalyst also spoke with many of their clients, who embraced the idea of building an agency partner poised for their future growth.

"I've worked with Catalyst for almost 15 years," said Ann Lindsey, Senior Marketing Leader at GE Money. "They consistently provide a level of strategic thinking that's really hard to come by. I particularly appreciate their commitment to growing our business.  It's not just that they have great ideas and new ways to talk to our customers… it's something about how their people think that makes them really different."

Jeffrey Hayzlett, chief marketing officer for Eastman Kodak and author of The Mirror Test, concurred. "People are the difference in what makes a brand or business good to outstanding," he said. "The people at Catalyst know how to connect the dots. They have great analytic thinking and they constantly look for innovative ways to move our business forward."   

Today's CMOs face a myriad of challenges, and Catalyst is well positioned to approach each opportunity as their ally. "The marketplace today is increasingly complex, and the CMO has to be able to justify performance across every channel," said Jeff Cleary, Catalyst's other founding partner. " Trying to put all the pieces together, being able to genuinely evaluate the impact of one channel strategy on the next and then adjust on the fly, that's not a job for the faint of heart.  You can hire five agencies with specialized expertise, and spend half your day just trying to manage them all-but at the end of the day, somebody has to put the big picture together.

"Shouldn't your agency be able to do that?" he said. "That's really what our clients want. They want more than expertise in multiple channels, they want more than the ability to tell them where they are now. They want their agency to show them where to lead their brands tomorrow. They want to take the guesswork out of their marketing decisions. That's the agency of the future, and at Catalyst, they get it today."