Imprint Projects’ Adam Katz on Communities of Purpose

Adam Katz:

You have to deliver on business value at every step of the way in order to achieve that more high-minded purpose- or mission-driven objective.

Rob Goodman:

Hi everyone, and welcome to Now What?, the podcast from Wix about how technology is changing…everything. I'm your host, Rob Goodman, and in this series, we're talking all about evolution in business, design, development and beyond. In this new season of the show, we're diving into customer experience.

Rob Goodman:

As the world has rapidly transformed, customers’ expectations, behavior and needs have adapted with it. Paired with the emergence of new forms of social media, digital currency, the metaverse and so much more, navigating what this means for you and your organization can be a lot. We're bringing you fresh interviews and new insights from leaders that are reshaping business today to better prepare you for what's ahead.

Rob Goodman:

Adam Katz is a community-minded brand strategist, cultural consultant and entrepreneur. He's the CEO of Imprint Projects, whose mission, as they say it, is to replace advertising with cultural production and dialogue. Adam and the team have worked with Google, Lego, Levis and Sonos and nonprofits like the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and The Museum of Modern Art. Their work has been lauded by many including Ad Age, who named the firm best small agency, best culture agency and best experiential agency. In this episode, Adam and I talk about the future of brands and community, how brands can credibly show up and support communities of purpose and we discuss what's next for branded experiences in Web3, the metaverse and community funded creator economies, now an even more creative space given the rise of tokens, crypto and digital currencies. You're in for a great conversation with Adam Katz of Imprint Projects on how brands can authentically fuel communities to make a real business impact. Adam, welcome to the Now What? podcast, so great to have you here.

Adam Katz:

Thanks for having me. It's a pleasure.

Rob Goodman:

Let's start off and tell listeners a little bit about Imprint Projects, what you all do and how did you start the agency?

Adam Katz:

Yeah, thanks. Well, I always start with a little bit of my personal background, just because I think it informs a lot of how we framed the business, the people that work at this business and even the work that we do. Before having a marketing agency, I worked in a nonprofit arts space as a curator, as a programmer, also organizing music shows, DIY venues and things like that, and was often in this position, brokering relationships between different kinds of organizations, especially, and increasingly between brands and nonprofits or brands and community groups.

Adam Katz:

My partners that I co-founded the business with, David and Dina, also had fine art interest. One ran a bookstore and the other a nonprofit art space in San Francisco. All of us had kind of been roped into these marketing things. I say that, affectionately, we were very excited about, first of all, having resources to do some of the things that we were already interested in doing by working with brands. Then also, especially compelled by like this intersection between commerce and culture, that at the time felt a little bit dangerous. I mean, even 15 years ago, this was a very different kind of context, at least within our community.

Adam Katz:

Our first projects were working with either artist friends to help them broker partnerships with brands, doing things that were hopefully a little bit more interesting than a sneaker collab or a t-shirt design. We were very interested in creating community spaces for art production and art education, and then ended up hosting a lot of parties, programming events in music and art and creating almost artist community spaces on behalf of brands.

Adam Katz:

The company started like a lot of companies where initially it was kind of a lark, and then over time, something that we saw a lot of opportunity in. I think it was only maybe a few months that we had like that Robin Hood ambition of getting money to do projects with our friends. But very quickly we saw that there was this huge opportunity to actually introduce just even more effective marketing approaches to some of these brands that didn't know how to operate in culture, both because of the disconnect between the way that their organization worked, the speed and the connection to even some of the communities of consumers that they had. We were very interested in this idea that brands had a commitment that went beyond just their product offering to support the people that were connected to that brand, or had feelings about that brand.

Rob Goodman:

When you talk about community, I mean, nowadays more and more brands and companies are talking about the value of community and community building. Why do you think there is more and more of this shift to building an engaged audience that is part of something, not just a company selling a thing to an end user?

Adam Katz:

I'm curious even to hear from you or others about what that shift is. We've always been very much in this world. We frame our business as a post-advertising creative agency. That's what we call it. The idea there is not that we are against advertising, certainly we work within that paradigm of advertising and marketing, but that we like to think of advertising and marketing as almost like the material or the vehicle for some of this culture's work.

Adam Katz:

We've always been in that. I think there has been a shift, at least in the way that people talk about community, certainly. It used to be something that I had to explain why a brand would even care about their community or what the community might mean for a brand or for a business. That has shifted, I don't know that the investment in marketing has shifted.

Adam Katz:

This still seems as if most of the money and the energy goes towards above the line campaigns and performance marketing and digital marketing, but certainly the rhetoric is there. I'm interested in that. Community as a buzzword, as a value, is clearly something that is resonant. What we always say is how do we help businesses support the things that they say with things that they do? How do you follow up with an invitation to participate rather than just a statement? How do you invert a little bit of the traditional marketing logic, which is a broadcast logic and actually create opportunities for people to have conversation, to introduce dialogue to co-create.

Adam Katz:

When you ask about this shift, I do recognize it certainly, we get incoming calls and invitations from banks and insurance companies and car companies. It used to just be like culture brands, apparel, and technology and things like that. There is something significant happening right now. I connect it a little bit to coming out of this pandemic. I also connect it to, I think just a greater awareness of how the tools in which we define and kind of create community. Oftentimes the social networks, how aware people are of the alienating effects that they also have. I think just culturally, there's a desire now for maybe smaller, but certainly more meaningful community experiences.

Adam Katz:

These aren't something that everybody has in their daily life. I'm not suggesting that brands are the best providers of that, but certainly it's part of how we kind of structure our world. We have always been mission-driven to replace advertising and what we mean by that is to replace advertising with cultural production. Making new things and dialogue the exchange of ideas, and these I think are really the cornerstones for the idea of community that we stand behind.

Rob Goodman:

Yeah. It felt like during the pandemic or, if we're still in the pandemic, at this time people flocked even more so online to try to find community, try to engage with people, TikTok, all of that, and now potentially coming out of it, having more chances and more opportunities to connect both the physical with the digital seems to be something that people are craving yearning for. As you said, brands want to dive into that.

Rob Goodman:

I want to hear from your perspective, what is the Imprint Project's approach to building community? Because I know you have a specific lens by which you think about crafting and cultivating an actual community, that's going to be behind something and engaged and not just kind of that sticker on there, that yeah, we've got our community thing going.

Adam Katz:

Yeah. This has been something that was always embedded in how we operated as people who had universal insights as community builders, ourselves universal insights from arts and culture space. But what we believe are kind of common characteristics of community across the board. Our approach is to help brands build communities of purpose. When I say communities of purpose, it's important to understand that this is not necessarily the best community or the biggest community, but it is a very powerful way of framing community. It's important to understand the other kinds of communities.

Adam Katz:

Communities can be communities of place. These are when you have people that have a shared background, either, maybe they live in the same place, shared circumstance, a language or maybe ethnic heritage. You can imagine a community of New Yorkers or a community of English speakers and people belong to these communities by representing and identifying as part of this community.

Adam Katz:

But it's kind of a loose circumstantial sense of community. Most brands think about their community in terms of practice. Communities of practice are people who share interest or an activity like buying something, a consumer community, fans of Supreme, for example, or fans of the New York Yankees or perhaps people who identify as home cooks that share this practice.

Adam Katz:

The way that you participate in this community is usually through consumption. You enjoy doing this practice and you connect with other people who enjoy doing this practice. That's really important to brands. Certainly that's the biggest community that brands have. You could call all the consumers of a brand that kind of community, a community of practice. What we try to level up to is to build communities of purpose, which is when you actually have people who are united around a common cause, a goal, and they share a journey.

Adam Katz:

These are more characteristically understood as the people who are either educators or creatives or organizer activists, they're people who are trying to do something, they're learning together. They're teaching each other, they're changemakers, they're out in the world, sharing an ambition for some different future. This is super powerful for brands, because you can then show up, not just as part of this community, but as a resource to supercharge, to catalyze the activity of this community, to help pursue this desired shared outcome. It's a very credible way for a brand to participate. It's also a very sustainable investment for the brand, because it's not predicated on some of the normal marketing segmentation that happens, right, which is geographic demographic. In fact, it's accessible to anybody who might share this same desired outcome, the same cause.

Rob Goodman:

When you're talking to brands about ROI and what they can get in return for these kinds of activities, what are you talking to them about and how do they compare it against their other activities, whether it be advertising or paid social or what it might be?

Adam Katz:

Our clients typically are globally dominant brands or industry game changers. These are companies who are well established. Part of that is the way that we operate typically. This is, it's an interesting moment right now, because the way that we have operated is to complement the performance marketing, the higher level campaign brand work that's happening with these more meaningful invitations to engage.

Adam Katz:

We believe that they're important complements, that they are actually really essential for brands that are planning three and five years into the future. The ROI that we present is oftentimes measured in the same traditional marketing metrics, engagement, reach, sentiment. We've proven that these projects can scale, certainly reaching millions and billions of people, but more importantly, that the sentiment, the ability to actually change somebody's perception of brand through some of these meaningful experiences is the most powerful kind of marketing effect that we offer through these projects.

Adam Katz:

As I said earlier, it's kind of backing up the rhetoric of a campaign with the action and showing a commitment that ultimately is what we believe consumers want to see and resonate most with and want to be part of as well.

Rob Goodman:

Who are some of the brands that you're working with, where you've put these campaigns into action and seeing some good results?

Adam Katz:

There's a range of clients that we work with and continuously work with. I like to talk about the ones that we have these long extended relationships with. Levi's, Amazon, Google, Spotify, currently working with SoundCloud, Eventbrite. These are brands that we have many years history. We have worked for eight years with Sonos. A project like the Levi's Music Project is a great example. With Levi's we serve many parts of the brand and have launched all kinds of community projects with them, everything from supporting skateboarders and supporting commuter cyclists. Currently we run the Levi's Music Project, and this is a five to 10 year strategy that we developed to help Levi's stay at the center of music culture at a time when all brands, about eight years ago, when every brand was developing their music strategy, Levi's had always been very credible in the music space and wanted a vision for maintaining that authority.

Adam Katz:

We said, "Well, it's not just about working with top tier talent, but it's about investing in the next generation." So we developed a program called the Levi's Music Project, which was bringing global superstars as well as regional talent into music education programs. We helped them launch music education programs in their hometown. The first one was with Alicia Keys. We developed a music and technology program in Midwood, Brooklyn, but we went on to do these same projects with SZA, Ben Staples, Snoop Dogg, last year with Justin Timberlake. But in addition to these global marquee programs, we've also created the toolkit for regional teams, marketing teams around the world to adopt the same model, bring in local talent, connect them with a non-profit creative workshops, music education resources, and produce a ton of content out of this engagement to tell the story about Levi's commitment to music, both elevating the youth musicians, as well as giving a really amazing credible opportunity for these performing artists.

Adam Katz:

This last year, that program shifted not just from an IRL program, but moved into a Discord server where we're now able to scale that same mentorship relationship for global music communities around the world and are working with tons of new artists and youth community groups.

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Rob Goodman:

For brands out there listening, who want to start taking more of these practices for community building to heart, what advice do you give them about doing things that are, it's such an overused word, but more authentic and really going to resonate with an audience that they want to build up, not only as a consumer base, but as an action-oriented group?

Adam Katz:

I think it's a great question and authentic is an overused word, but I don't think it's the wrong word. I think it's the difference between looking for authentic outcomes versus starting from an authentic source. That's the first kind of conversation we have, which is what is the credible thing that this brand can do to support a community of purpose. What are the resources that make sense for you to provide, what are the relationships that exist already that you can build upon and what credibility have you established through either commitments that you've made as a brand or are willing to make into the future?

Adam Katz:

I think it's important also to call out that it's not about big statements. It's about commitments that are sustainable and long-term. We all know that consumers are savvy and they understand how marketing and brands work. They also understand the power of brands to actually affect real change.

Adam Katz:

Whether it's through partnership or investment or direct community action, making commitments that feel like they're part of a long-term commitment, I think is the really important starting place. It's not about the scale of these things, but it's the rigor with which the brands show up for these.

Adam Katz:

Oftentimes we help brands create that level of commitment because, I mean, how long are CMOs in their position? How long are marketing teams stable and how long do campaigns last? Right? We like to think outside of a campaign about building these community platforms that really they don't require but they benefit most from a multi-year type of commitment and that perspective.

Adam Katz:

First is connecting your commitment to real core brand principles and then making commitments that are sustainable. I think the other thing that's really important and hopefully marketers recognize is if you don't have measurable success at the outset, and at every point along the line, and I mean delivering against marketing metrics, then it's not going to be essential to the business. It's not going to be embedded in the business. It's not going to be reinvested in and it's not going to last.

Adam Katz:

I think kind of a counterintuitive piece of insight that we bring to these projects is that you have to deliver on business value at every step of the way in order to achieve that more kind of high- minded purpose- or mission-driven objective, because it has to be embedded in supporting the business to get the full support and to get support outside of just the marketing org as well.

Adam Katz:

The most ambitious and successful projects that we launch, they're not existing in a silo and they're supported by different departments. They have executive leadership, there's marketers that are across it, but there's also product people, there's people that are merchants, there's people that are doing other corporate communications, and everybody should get theirs from these programs because they are the beating heart of a purpose-driven brand. They are the most valuable story to tell when it comes to what the brand stands for and the communities that are going to be advocating on behalf of it.

Rob Goodman:

I love that. I think it's so critical to success getting that cross-company buy-in, and as you said, you need everyone invested in it so that the program itself can be fueled and it's like a cycle. It will perform better if it's aligned within the organization and everyone is driving towards those business outcomes that will fuel the company's success. I'm really curious to ask about what you think is coming next. You mentioned Levi's and bringing the community to Discord and on the tip of everyone's tongue is metaverse and thinking about AR capabilities and what might come next with VR. How are you thinking about the next kind of generation or next step in community building, as we think about avatars, virtual worlds, further fusing of the digital and real worlds?

Adam Katz:

Yeah, I think it's a fascinating time, partly just because of the currency this rhetoric has, it's almost like crypto and community are connected by a thin thread and everybody who's building anything in crypto is building a community and not a product. I think this is super exciting. I'm somewhat suspicious of some of these projects, because I don't think that there's broad agreement about what community even means or what it takes to sustain this sense of community and the value that the businesses are going to derive from it. But I'm all in for the enthusiasm around this and the value that it's afforded.

Adam Katz:

That's where I stand first. Broadly, within Web3, I worry that a lot of the kind of utopian thinking around it will probably result in refashioning a lot of what already exists. A lot of the hierarchy, the gatekeeping, the inequity that exists in a Web2 or IRL world. But for brands, I think we can sidestep that in some ways and present an ambitious aspirational vision.

Adam Katz:

I think there's great opportunity for the kind of work that we do. If you kind of chart over the last 15 years, I guess the way in which you presented community brand work or experiential marketing, or even social, it goes from taking PR metrics from events to taking social metrics from the kind of engagements that you'd create. But I see this future where the community programs that we are developing are going to be managed, incentivized and organized through Web3 architectures.

Adam Katz:

I'm super excited about social tokens and tokenize communities and the ways in which these can support brands who want to reward participation and contribution within a community. I think that's something that we know as community builders is a really essential part of any vibrant community. Now there's mechanics that exist for anybody to kind of create those incentive structures. How brands engage with it, I think, is still kind of a wild west, but it is an exciting opportunity.

Rob Goodman:

Some of the examples you've talked to me about, like what you're doing with SoundCloud and Patreon and even Rally, I'd love for you to tell listeners about how you're kind of fusing that community-fueled creator economy through crypto, through Web3. Tell us more about that.

Adam Katz:

It's really interesting. First of all, there's both this opportunity to support brands with community building, but then these brands have this imperative to support their own creators, the creators on their platform to be more successful. That relies on those individuals or those organizations building their own community of support. Patreon is a great example. I think increasingly SoundCloud in the model that they have around fan-powered royalties is an amazing example of this. The logic is simply that with a few very committed followers, fans, patrons, you can have a very sustainable, very independent creative career. There's podcasts and there's artists and there's music makers and all kinds of people who are figuring out new ways rather than growing the million followers to really serve a core audience. Right? I think the other insight is simply that some of those communities are both the most compelling and legible stories to talk about how a brand works and the product offering for a brand.

Adam Katz:

That's how we've thought about SoundCloud and Patreon is both elevating some of the talent, the premier talent on those platforms and showing how they navigate this world, as well as providing resources to those creators that go beyond just the product offering. How can those emerging musicians really create a career that is sustainable both through the royalties that they get on SoundCloud, but also finding more efficient ways to collaborate with people by sourcing other revenue streams, by educating them on the ways in which they can navigate a post-label industry.

Adam Katz:

I think it's really interesting for those kinds of brands and then there's services, I guess, like Rally. Rally is a crypto built for creators in their communities. It's an off-chain Ethereum-based platform that allows creators to actually mint their own social tokens. Like I was saying earlier, the opportunity here is for Rally and these social tokens to help anybody have their own tokenize community with gated access for different services or access to their art or creativity, and also to incentivize other people to help co-create this community with them.

Adam Katz:

It's not again just about a fan community, although those are great. Right? Where you can almost, being part of a fan club, get access to early music or concert tickets or something like that. But we're really excited about also the ability to invite those fans to interact with each other, to help make things that are new, to help support that artist in ways that they can't even imagine quite yet. We're working on a few projects right now where we're figuring out how visual artists and sometimes even musicians can launch these tokenize communities as a corollary to their existing fan base, inviting collectors in, inviting casual fans in and having different levels at which people are participating and benefiting as members of this community.

Rob Goodman:

You're operating kind of on the edge of technology, so to speak, and how it relates to community. I'm curious about two aspects of your work, one as a team, as an agency, how do you stay current? How do you stay connected to what's happening? How do you yourself stay educated? Then the second part is how do you educate and enlighten and share with the brands that you're working with? What is worth an investment in a new technology and what is worth maybe a wait and see approach?

Adam Katz:

I love that assertion that we're at the bleeding edge of new technology. The truth is that we have always been kind of agnostic about technology. We were not a PR agency when putting on events was the thing to do. We were not a social media agency when building a social community was the thing to do. We're not a Web3 agency, now that's the fashion of the day.

Adam Katz:

We've always been a post-advertising agency committed to building communities for brands. Because of that, we don't necessarily show up with the technical expertise, but we have this insight that spans all of these different tools, I guess. Technology tools, as well as, like, cultural trends. That said, it's very important to stay engaged with those emerging platforms to help our clients navigate them and to understand the opportunities.

Adam Katz:

Our clients are typically larger global brands. They're not always the first movers. Right? They might not be the first one to experiment in this space, but they know that it's good to be the first, let's say in the second wave of brands showing up in that space. What we try to do, I think the Levi's example is a really great one, is to pilot these programs. It's not about shifting all the resources from one thing to another, but to pilot them and to experiment and to learn. That's honestly how we do our own kind of self-education. It's through piloting projects, it's through constant curiosity and experimentation, oftentimes through the brand projects that we're doing, but also through our personal work, I think everybody at Imprint Projects has their own side hustle, their side interest, their creative projects. I think that's a really important thing that informs the way that we show up to support our clients.

Rob Goodman:

Yeah. I love that. Adam, I want to change gears and ask you a fun question that we've been asking guests, and that is: tell us about a daily or weekly habit or practice of yours that has positively impacted your life or your business. What have you been up to?

Adam Katz:

I have a long list of the daily practices that I have not kept, but the ones that I keep and keep me sane. I think the first and foremost is eating together with my family. Cooking and eating meals and sharing food together is really important for us. It's something that has been very grounding. We care a lot about the food we eat and that time we share together. That's like a family thing.

Adam Katz:

I personally just, I have to find some alone time. I usually find that through exercise, running and swimming, but making sure that's a no media consumption moment and trying to be outside. Then the last one is, as a daily practice, I spend so much time working committed to family stuff, music is like a thread that sustains me. It's a way of both traveling, accessing different parts of the world, sharing with people, exploring culture. As somebody who's not a musician myself. It is also just a purely kind of like a pleasurable thing to do and make it part of not just every day, but almost every minute of every day.

Rob Goodman:

Adam, thank you so much for joining the show and sharing so much. It's been a pleasure talking to you.

Adam Katz:

Thank you so much, Rob.

Rob Goodman:

That was such a great conversation with Adam Katz. Thanks so much for tuning in. There was so much goodness in that interview, here are a few of the moments that really stood out for me. First, the idea that brands can join communities, not to co-op them, but to supercharge them, to empower the changemakers, the teachers, the influencers in that space to help them reach their desired outcome. As Adam says, it's a very credible way for a brand to participate. Plus, that kind of community support goes beyond the bounds of typical demographic and geographic boundaries of marketing and customer segmentations.

Rob Goodman:

Next, Adam lays out those essential first steps that brands need to take in terms of community building. He says that first it's about making commitments that are really core to your brand principles and next, making sure that from the very start, at every point, your community engagements are delivering against marketing metrics, so that the activity is going to be essential to your business. This is not only critical from a marketing activation standpoint, but also when it comes to building consensus and longstanding support for a program internally across your company's most pivotal stakeholders.

Rob Goodman:

Lastly, and this one may seem obvious, but I think it bears repeating that technology of the day should not drive your decision making as a brand. Start from that authentic place of fueling those communities and driving your business and then find the right technology or platform, whatever it may be to bring that experience to life.

Rob Goodman:

You can discover more about Imprint Projects at imprintprojects.com and learn more about Adam and his team's work and our show notes wix.com/nowwhat. 

Rob Goodman:

This is Now What? by Wix, the podcast about how technology is changing…everything. Be sure to subscribe and follow the show wherever you're listening to get new episodes first, and please rate, review and share this show with your friends and colleagues too. Now What? podcast is produced and hosted by me, Rob Goodman, Executive Producer for Content at Wix. Audio engineering and editing is by Brian Pake at Pacific Audio. Music is composed and performed by Kimo Muraki. Executive Producers from Wix are Susan Kaplow and me, Rob Goodman. You can learn more at wix.com/nowwhat. We'll see you soon.