Logo

Klatzko Brings Marketing to Media Storm

Mar 18, 2009  •  Post A Comment

Marc Klatzko never thought he’d be working at a media agency.
He originally wanted to get into the TV business and landed a spot in the on-air interstitial department at Showtime. There he met Craig Woerz and Tim Williams, who founded Media Storm, a media and planning agency that has many television outlets as clients. Now he’s managing director of creative and marketing at Media Storm.
Mr. Woerz and Mr. Williams were expanding and had asked Mr. Klatzko if he knew of any good media directors they could hire.
“I said, ‘I’m not a media director, but what I can bring to the agency is more of a marketing creative sensibility and the experience of being on the client side,’” he says.
He joined Media Storm almost four years ago, and “from there we started growing out this capability of marketing and creative and looking at media planning a little bit differently, and how we can marry the message and the environment to really hit that home run.”
Mr. Klatzko helped mastermind a campaign for the Court TV series “Parco P.I.” that may have been more memorable than the show it promoted. The “Emily campaign” used billboards to introduce a woman who discovered her husband was cheating on her. The billboards attracted a flurry of media attention that was fanned as Emily started a blog and did some other in-market stunts.
“We had news outlets on the street calling for Emily to come out and do interviews, so it piqued the cultural zeitgeist,” Mr. Klatzko says.
Eventually the effort was revealed to be a tune-in campaign.
“It was really successful in that it drove a lot of PR buzz and we were able to extend our client’s marketing dollars,” Mr. Klatzko says.
At Media Storm, Mr. Klatzko works with clients including Scripps Networks, WE tv, FX and TruTV, and his marketing and creative team tries to touch base with all of the agency’s clients.
“On a whole, that’s the philosophy of us as an agency, which is in this kind of market we really want to make sure that before we spend any of our clients’ dollars that we’re really looking at all of the assets that they have, all the capabilities,” he says. “Whether it’s helping them with their creative message, marketing strategy, driving partnerships or looking at their on-air, we have people who have sat in their shoes and really understand the assets that these networks have to play with.”
Mr. Klatzko was born in New York, but his parents moved from Queens north to New City in Rockland County when he was young.
As a kid, he wanted to be an orthopedic surgeon.
“My introduction to orthopedic surgery came in the sixth grade when I was skiing at Hunter Mountain and took one more run than I should have and sort of crashed into a Snowcat,” he recalls. “I hit that pretty hard, bounced off, broke my leg in a couple places, so I had an interesting introduction to the orthopedic surgeon. I was so amazed that this guy could put me back together, and I was pretty impressed.”
At that point he wanted to be an orthopedic surgeon. But at the same time, he wasn’t interested in being a doctor. “I realized that was not for me,” he says.
He studied literature and rhetoric at Binghamton University in western New York.
At that point, “I had a love of entertainment and wanted to be a TV script writer,” he says, so he began calling on TV companies, landing an offer to freelance in Showtime’s on-air interstitial group.
“I got my foot in the door, and from there sort of fell in love with creative services and marketing,” he says.
Mr. Klatzko also met his wife at Showtime. She left the network to go to culinary school. After deciding not to work in a kitchen, she took a job doing event marketing for KitchenAid and Jenn-Air.
“We had our first ‘worlds collide’ thing about two or three years ago. Food Network became the title sponsor of the South Beach Food & Wine Festival and KitchenAid was the company that provided all the culinary stages,” he says. “So we were down there with Food Network and she was down there with KitchenAid and it kind of felt like we were back at Showtime working together.”
Mr. Klatzko says he and his wife enjoy traveling. They honeymooned in Bali.
“That was pretty exotic,” he says.
Last year they went on a trip that took them to Barcelona and Madrid, then Florence and the Chianti region of Italy.
“That was about as much time as I could get off,” he says.
Who knew? Despite his childhood mishap, Mr. Klatzko still loves to ski and is a “big golfer” when he can get out. He says he’s played Pebble Beach a few times, and has hit the ball into the ocean on 18 every single time.

3 Comments

  1. I agree with your thoughts here and I really love your blog! I’ve bookmarked it so that I can come back & read more in the future.

  2. Can I just answer what a comfort en route for locate a big name who in fact knows what theyre talking regarding on the web. You absolutely tell how to transport an subject to brightness plus make it important. Additional community call for to read this and appreciate this side of the story. I cant believe youre not additional popular because you positively contain the gift.

Your Comment

Email (will not be published)