Ashton's the Katalyst Behind Social Media Marketing

Though Katalyst Media -- the three-pronged film, television, and digital media production company Ashton Kutcher spearheads with partner Jason Goldberg -- might still be finding its footing in some ventures (The Katalyst-produced CW series The Beautiful Life was  canceled in September after just two episodes), its digital media department has found huge success as the first producers to make serialized, branded content exclusively for Facebook. Katalyst HQ, the company's original video series broadcast on the social media site, consists of three-minute clips that follow Office-esque faux documentary plots starring Katalyst Media employees, with branding for companies like Hot Pockets and Cheetos integrated through out. All of the episodes incorporate familiar workplace themes with a humorous slant -- one features a Katalyst worker who falls in love with an associate's "phone voice," another shows employees pitching bizarre plot ideas for a new Kutcher film to a frustrated Goldberg. Now in its second season, the series has been viewed by over nine million Facebook users who have shared the content over 62 times each. In other words, it's popular.

Kutcher's attachment to the project, as well as other celebrity cameos (Gary Busey has a recurring role as Katalyst' Media's human resources director ), likely has much to do with the series' popularity. But Sarah Ross, head of digital media at Katalyst, chatted with PAPERMAG about why else she thinks the show has taken off and why she hesitates to label their work as "marketing."



How did you come up with the idea to do a web series?
We started in a very organic way here in our office.  Our receptionist was actually given a flip cam by Ashton Kutcher and just told to start shooting around the office. She started shooting little vignettes of people just in their natural, day-to-day experiences at Katlayst and given the fact that we are a production office based in Hollywood, there were all kinds of interesting antics that were happening in our office every day. We started posting that video to our Katalyst page on Facebook, and we found that people were really, really loving the video clips, because it was this sort of voyeuristic look inside of Hollywood production office. 

Did you want it to be more like a reality television show?
We definitely wanted to make it entertaining for consumers. But we also wanted to demonstrate our commitment to the digital space, and to living publicly within a social medium -- that we as an office are willing to put our employees and the story lines of things that happen in our office on the social web. It's designed to be entertaining, compelling and funny, but it's also a demonstration of our commitment to social media.

Why do you think the series has been so popular?
I think our first season had such compelling metrics behind it because it was a new idea coming into the Facebook system. That's one piece of it. The second piece of it is that we've been really focused on making sure that the content is organic and accessible to Facebook  audiences. And that's it's highly relatable, so that the average consumer on Facebook can actually look at this and see themselves in our content and see parallels to their own experiences in their own work place.

How did Katalyst decide to get into marketing?
Katalyst has three lines of business. We have a film division, a television division, and a digital division. Each of those businesses have different models around them as it relates to the digital side of the house; our mission is to create original content for the web. But we've been very committed to monitoring that original content through brand integration. It's very similar to the way that reality television is packaged. I hesitate to classify what we're doing as marketing services. We really are original content producers in a studio for social media. And we just happen to monetize the original content we create through integrative brand partnerships as you're seeing in Katalyst HQ. I hesitate to say that we're in the marketing business.

So ad agencies shouldn't be worried? Or should they look to you as a model?
What we realized early on in the social media movement was that there were all of the incredible social utilities that were gaining audiences at just an alarming rate. Facebook is the best example, having 300 million unique consumers on their platform. Marketers look at those audiences and say, "How do we get our brand message into these utilities?" With Facebook and Twitter, though, there's not a lot of inventory to buy. In the case of Twitter, right now, there's none. So what we've recognized as original content creators, is that if we're creating content that can be distributed on those utilities, and if we have a way to have that content carry a brand message, we're delivering value to consumers as well as to brands. We recognize that content can be a solution for brands that are seeking to reach audiences through those utilities.

What's in store for the rest of season two?
You're going to see a number of celebrity guest stars rolling out in this season. It's rumored that our human resources director Gary Busey will coming back, so you can look forward to that.