Catalyst Swarm Media&Marketing Lab

[IMPACT]

Project Catalyst is a full success in initiating impactful, community led projects. As projects mature, they establish strong services and formats. However, as the projects and the participating community members are fully focused on the execution, many projects have a lack of time and resources to focus on crucial media & marketing campaigns to increase their outreach and showcase their services to the broader community.

The Catalyst Swarm identified the problem and wants to offer a direct solution. 

We want to explore and establish a Catalyst Swarm Media & Marketing (M&M) Lab in collaboration with professional marketing experts which also know well about Project Catalyst and the kind of projects which emerge in our ecosystem. 

The main goal is to set up a Media and Marketing lab and to offer direct Marketing & Media services to Catalyst projects. With the M&M Lab we will increase the outreach of several promising projects and will help to improve visibility among the wider Cardano community. 

The M&M Lab will offer following solutions:

• Create standardised pitch videos for Catalyst projects (restricted to max 50 projects in fund 8) to share their ideas, vision and challenges
• Use our social media channels (mainly Twitter, YouTube and Discord) as a stage for Catalyst projects
• Create challenge/theme based trailers to feature a group of projects
• Co-create media collaterals with Catalyst projects, Cardano Foundation and IOG ((example: see YouTube-Link)

Future direction of M&M Labs:

Since our capacity via treasury funding is limited, there is the possibility that projects from Catalyst can receive marketing and media services for a fee. This includes the conception and production of media content as well as the creation and development of communication and marketing strategies. As our team are also experts in the founding and development of start-ups, we can even offer support in business development. Our goal is that within the first 3 months after a successful funding at least 5 projects receive professional support from us. 

The Swarm M&M Lab is going to create a Media and Marketing framework which is owned by the community and equally accessible to all. The M&M Lab aims to provide a stream of resources to teams that want to market their projects and contribute back to the community by sharing part of their efforts in terms of open source projects, open-source frameworks and accessible knowledge.

M&M Labs are building Marketing and Media tools to support new forms of collaboration and especially communication, which is as essential as the technology. All tech experts need a variety of disciplines to work together with a common goal. M&M Labs helps the non marketers to get a voice and become more visible. M&M labs organises virtual pitch events to bring the development ecosystem together and to empowers the Catalyst projects to get more visibility in the community (contribute back by providing transparency, sharing status quo, knowledge and insights), as well as increasing their reach on multiple channels to people beyond the community in order to grow the entire ecosystem in a competitive environment.

We also aim to attract new Marketing and Media experts to support the M&M Labs. We do this by reaching out via our social media channels and potentially hiring freelancers to extend our workbench and to provide them access to the Catalyst/Cardano ecosystem.

The Outcomes of the Marketing and Media Labs will be circulated in the Catalyst & Cardano Community. Main activities will be documented in the Catalyst Swarm Gitbook.

Main Risk for this proposal might be a clear expectation management. As we start with a small team, at the beginning we won't be able to provide services to all proposers.

Therefore, once fundings is approved, our focus will be on recruiting new team members to rapidly staff up the Catalyst Swarm Marketing & Media Labs.

[FEASIBILITY]

May 2022

Client outreach and first delivers of services

Onboarding of Content Creators

Development of basic on air promotion package

Recording of first pitch videos

June 2022

Creation of Marketing Content Libraries

Recording and editing of videos

Publishing pitch videos on YouTube and short clips on Twitter

Submitting follow up proposals in Project Catalyst Fund 9 to further grow the Catalyst Swarm M&M Labs

July 2022

Extended creation of Marketing Content Libraries

Recording and editing of videos

Publishing pitch videos on YouTube and short clips on Twitter

Documenting collaterals open document files on Catalyst Swarm Gitbook

Project Management and Content Creation:

4 persons working 10h a week for 3 month.

4.000$ per person per month

= 48.000$

Tools (hypefury, adobe creative suite, etc.), Templates, Licences, Documentation:

= 1.500$

Core Team:

• Dominik Tilman (www.dominiktilman.com): Entrepreneur, startup consultant, marketer and author of the book ‘Integration of Marketing and Sales’
• Thomas Zuchtriegel (https://www.linkedin.com/in/thomaszuchtriegel/): 17 years of experience in marketing & media creation for automotive, aircraft, finance, white goods, television and Project Catalyst
• Felix Weber: Initiator of several projects in Catalyst (including Catalyst Swarm, Bridge Builder, Ambassadors Guild, etc.)

[AUDITABILITY]

Number of Media & Marketing requests from Catalyst project teams

Number of created Media & Marketing content 

Media coverage of the provided content

Furthermore, the activities of the Swarm M&M Labs will be tracked on the Swarm Github repository.

Minimum 5 high profile Projects receiving direct services from M&MLabs

Staffing up the M&MLabs Team

Create various short video clips of projects to help them to increase their visibility 

Get more request than M&MLabs is able to handle

Increase visibility & reach of Catalyst projects, tracked by social media interactions (likes, retweet, comment, share …)

This proposal is basically a new one. However, it can also be seen in some parts as a further development of Idea Fest. Idea Fest previously had two main components: (1) Direct interaction between the community and proposers and (2) making the recordings of the pitches available in the form of Youtube videos. The first component will continue to take the form of a live online event (see Idea Fest Proposal). However, we have found that the recordings (2) are difficult to consume, since they are too long e.g. Therefore, we would like to give a variety of projects the opportunity to create short and concise videos directly with the M&M Labs and share them through our Swarm media channels (Twitter, Discord, etc.).