By pulling from his experiences as both an entrepreneur and a consultant Mickey Katz takes a very simplified approach to attacking problems and finding solutions that can be put into action. Startups looking for solutions on strategy, marketing tactics, or simply need a mentor to help them think through problems from a new perspective will find value in a discussion with Mickey. 

His career was built in the startup world with a focus in the mobile consumer B2C space targeting college students and universities. He currently acts as the Director of Operations at Campus Commandos and Co-Founder of a revolutionary mobile saas product connecting brands to college students on over 1,000 college campuses called Go Commando App. 

Guest Mickey Katz from Campus Commandos

Complete Show Transcript

Sherry : Mickey and I met at the consumer electronics show earlier this year. I was immediately blown away by his passion, creativity and the niche college market around which he built his business. Since that time, it seems an increasing number of brands are hedging their bets on the college crew and today Mickey is here to shed some of his insights with us. Welcome Mickey.

Mickey: Hi Sherry. Thank you so much for having me. I appreciate it.

Sherry : No, thank you for being here. I’m very excited to delve into talking to you about college.

What inspired you to join Campus Commandos, and why is the college demographic your primary focus?

Mickey: Yeah, great question. I think the best way to start is to understand how I got to working with my colleague, Adam at Campus Commandos and where college became a passion for me. My background is in mobile consumer marketing, specifically in the college space. I started my career in that space of over 10 years ago in the online food ordering world, specifically tailored to helping college students order food online, pickup, and delivery.

Mickey: I worked on both the website, mobile side, bringing right into event marketing to drive awareness for programs such as the clients that I worked with in that space. Over time, I had sold a couple of those companies and realized that there’s so many brands that love working with college students mostly, because this demographic is for the first time in their life away from mom and dad. They are making their own buying decisions for the most part, and they’re at a point in their life where they’re going to start to understand what brand is important to them, what they enjoy, and depending on how long they live, you’ve got a very long lifetime value for a consumer.

Mickey: It just felt like a wonderful place to be in. It’s also like a microcosm of what a consumer could be at any age in their life. You have a lot of testing, because this age group changes every single year. Every year you have new kids going into college and every year you have kids leaving college. It’s just this little laboratory of testing, and it’s just really fun and exciting.

Mickey: I joined Adam after meeting him from another friend of mine quite a few years ago. We had very similar interests, and I said, “Hey, I got this idea to build a mobile product.” and he said, “Listen, if I can raise the money, do you want to come out he and do it, and I said, “Yeah, why not? Let’s do it.” I left California, and my previous company and I moved out to the Midwest, and we started building this company and it’s been very strong ever since.

Sherry : That’s amazing, but originally you’re from Brooklyn, right? Then you went to California.

Am I wrong, or do you live on a farm in the Midwest?

Mickey: I was born in New York city, moved to New Jersey. From New Jersey, moved to California, from California went back to New Jersey, and then now yes, I live on an 11 acre horse farm in the Midwest and I love it.

Sherry : That is amazing. I’m going to come visit one day.

Mickey: You should. Absolutely.

Sherry : I will. I will. Talking about this demographic, I mean, I know that obviously a lot of it is online, but I’m very fascinated by everyone just looks to online now, but a large part of your business is experiential marketing. Tell us a little bit more about, and I remember back in my day when I worked at college and when I was in college, a lot of it was all these activations that happen, and I went to Miguel. What does that look like for you?

What does a typical campus activation look like?

Mickey: A typical college activation starts with understanding the where and the when like. Where is it going to take place on campus and when is it going to take place? The biggest challenge anytime we do an experiential program, especially when you’re looking at dollars and cents, is that when the event is finished, your money is finished with it to a degree. Your audience lives during that four to six hour timeframe.

Mickey: You ask yourself, “Well, how can I capitalize on the most amount of people that I can?” Generally, what we’ll do for a lot of our brands, at least in the college space, is going to be focused during the back to school timeframe. This is an opportunity for university students to show up to school at the beginning of the year. Generally, the universities will take advantage of the fact that all these students are there.

Mickey: They’ll put together programs where businesses can come and interact. We’d like to start a lot of the journeys for our brands at least when introducing that new brand to a student at the back of the school timeframe. You have thousands of students in a short period of time. You have the ability to engage with them, and then the next question we ask ourselves is what’s the most important thing that we need to gather from both the students and for the students to gather from the brand in the shortest period of time?

Mickey: We take a look at time, number of students, and information that’s relevant. Then we start to build out our experience. Generally, it needs to be eye-catching. It needs to be something that the students are going to want to share socially, independently. I don’t like to force social sharing. It’s very unauthentic, and when we’ve got a combination of a large number of students value that can be translated in 30 to 60 seconds, and an experience that can be both seen visually and seen socially, then you’re on the right track for something positive from an experiential standpoint.

Sherry : What is, when you say this visual, what’s the most creative visual you think you’ve ever brought to life? I know how hard that is. I once had a 3,000 pound vending machine delivered to an event.

What came to life for you that you were blown away by?

Mickey: It’s actually the simplest things in my opinion, that work the best for the students. No doubt a huge vending machine is eye catching, but I also think about all the logistical challenges that it takes to do something like that and to scale it. Often times, we’ll go with simple and effective. One of my favorite games to play with students, and I really like to make them games. I want the students to see a chance to win something, because that entices them to want to stick around.

Mickey: Even if they’re not necessarily interested in the brand’s product at first, they may not know about it. One of my favorite games to play is this product that we had built with a company, it is a table top money machine. It is about 60 pounds. It sits on a table,. and the student will stick their hand inside the machine and money will fly around, or paper bills will fly around.

Mickey: Now it’s awe-inspiring. It doesn’t have fireworks that come out of it, but it gives students an opportunity. They know what their chances are. They know what they need to do, and it only takes 10 seconds to do it. That also plays into, they can see it. They understand it from far away. It’s fast to participate in, and we can get a lot of people to go through the funnel as quickly as possible. For me, that’s the key.

Sherry : Interesting, and then what sparks me is interesting too, and I know that it makes the most sense. Okay. it’s the first week of school, the first few weeks, let’s do it now, but it’s odd that no one would take advantage of other events and ongoings on campus or even in sororities and fraternities that happen throughout the year.

Is there value for events that take place after back to school time?

Mickey: Oh yeah. We do a lot of programs with sororities. For some of our brands. We work with a makeup brand and we’ll have a makeup artists come into the sorority house. We’ll set up directors chairs. We’ll set up a table of the variety of products. All of the ladies will sit down, we’ll have some of the sorority ladies become a model.

Mickey: They will have a makeup demonstration done to them along with our artists talking about the different types of products, why they use it, how they use it. The objective of course, is we want these students to have an understanding as to this is a product that you may not know a lot about, and now I’m going to teach you how to use it.

Mickey: We have found that when we go into a sorority house, we take the time to have a quality engagement, not necessarily quantity, because that’s one of the challenges when you go to a sorority house. Now, some sororities in the South have huge numbers. We’ve done a sorority event where there were 300 women just in that sorority alone.

Sherry : Oh my God.

Mickey: I know it’s wild. I don’t know how they all live in the same house, but they do, but the idea is that you don’t have a huge audience, right? If you’re doing a sorority event with 50 or 75 women, as compared to a back to school program where you might have 10,000 people in attendance, you might end up spending the same amount of money from a brand side, but the quality of the engagement is going to be different.

Mickey: You have 75 to 300 women having an intimate experience for about an hour and a half as opposed to 10,000 people running around and learning about something for 30 seconds in a trade show atmosphere. There is a given a take and while there are a lot of opportunities that happen on college campuses throughout the year, we really have to take a look at how do we leverage what the brand is all about with the right opportunity for them.

Mickey: Sometimes it’s very obvious what we should do and then sometimes it involves a little bit of investigation, as far as what programs and activities are available on campus.

With all these activations, do you leverage influencers? Are you working with any influencers on campus?

Mickey: We do. We do. We want to make sure that we can amplify the things that we do from an experiential standpoint to live beyond just that moment. We’re doing some programs with clients right now where we have a mobile, we have a consumer brand of snack foods where we are doing sampling on campus. Students are setting up a footprint. They are distributing the samples and those student staff members that are handing out the samples are also being providing, excuse me, those students, staff members are also having a social media component.

Mickey: We have a student specifically for social media. They are promoting the event that’s happening. They’re promoting the product independently. We are able to capture both awareness on campus by these activations as well as our independent students that are sharing just on social media. Either to elevate the existing program or to just continue the conversation away from that physical component, because one of the things that I had mentioned earlier is that when the experiential program is done, if you don’t have a way for the conversation to continue, often times the amount of money you have spent just for that physical experience is over.

Mickey: We try to find ways to leverage and kind of squeeze as much as we can to try to get our clients a return on their investment, whether it’s sales or awareness, impressions, et cetera.

Sherry : I’m sure email marketing comes into effect there too.

Mickey: Oh absolutely. Really, we take a look at every possible multichannel marketing opportunity that might exist that makes sense with this demographic. While you think that students are not paying attention to email, it’s still one of the components that does get used a lot. They use their emails for school. They use their email to communicate with friends. Not only a social media and important component, but email marketing has not yet disappeared.

Sherry : Yeah, that’s why I say it, because I feel like everyone’s like, “Oh, go mobile,” but we see it with college. There still is a lot of interaction with email. I’m glad that obviously mobile and other channels work, but email still does too, so yeah.

Mickey: Yeah. There’s no doubt.

I know that there’s efficiencies in terms of rates for influencers in college, but other than that, what are some of the benefits that you see of working with influencers that are in this demo?

Mickey: My favorite thing about working with social media influencers, and when I use the word influencers in the college space, sometimes it’s difficult to rationalize the fact that oftentimes college students, their influence is actually a little bit smaller than maybe a professional influencer. Certainly there are college students that they understand that they’ve figured out from a young age that if they can promote themselves properly, they can actually make a career out of this. We believe that a lot of the college students today have anywhere from, 1500 to I would say nine to 10,000 followers on Instagram, and those are casual social media people.

Mickey: We’re not talking about students that realize that they can turn a career out of this. When we think of influence, it’s actually less about how many numbers they have, but it’s more about the types of engagement that they have with the people that they actually can influence, and I’m talking about their friends and their family. We have seen studies that show that when people purchase online, a lot of the decisions that they are making come from the influence of their friends and their family.

Mickey: When we look at the importance of a social media influencer in the college space, we’re actually looking at it from the position of this young man or this young lady on this specific campus, they actually do have influence specifically over their peers on that campus. There is a different type of value. It’s not just how do I have somebody with a lot of followers promote something across the country. I’m actually more interested in them promoting it to people that they know, and using social media allows us to get a much lower cost per impression than if we did an event on campus.

Sherry : No, for sure, and it’s so interesting. I mean, we’ve done a lot of campaigns, particularly this year with college influencers and they are super buttoned up. I mean, we were like, “Okay, maybe we should have calls with everyone to make sure they understand the campaign,” but it was like they were so reliable, so professional, but I get what you’re saying, it’s really this microcosm of where they have their influence, which justifies that they’re not necessarily going to have 50, 100,000 followers, but even 9,000 or 7,000 is a lot.

Mickey: Absolutely. I mean, how many people can you actually know and consider a friend on campus? I don’t know. In college, I probably had maybe 20 friends, and I wasn’t really in school at the time where social media was this massive way to just self-promote. Nowadays, I’m willing to bet that, and I don’t know the numbers to back this up, but I would imagine a significant percentage of those that are being followed are not actually real friends.

Mickey: They’re probably either acquaintances of acquaintances, but they don’t even know each other. You can still take advantage of that fact, because there’s still a connection and that connection is that they share the university. There’s something about the two of them that when that individual, that’s social influencer on campus says something, it makes a reaction a little bit different than if you’re following a celebrity, and you are aware of some of the things that they’re posting are also being compensated, because they have millions and millions of followers.

Sherry : I would think it also depends the school, I mean, again, I’m coming from Canada and we didn’t have a lot of this culture. It’s so unique to me, and I could see schools here that have a stronger community than other schools. Do you see that?

Mickey: Yeah. I mean when you take a look at a school being from Canada, obviously I know very little about the Canadian college culture. I don’t know. I don’t even know how long they stay. I follow hockey. A lot of these hockey players, they’re basically like 14 in college playing hockey, and then they leave college.

Mickey: I have very little understanding of how college works in Canada, but in the United States and specifically the types of size of universities, they’re like the size of cities. Ohio state is one of the largest universities in the country as far as population, and they have over 40,000 students that go to school there.

Mickey: There is no way for you at that university to know everybody, but if you are a student who is really active on social media that really understands that community, maybe you don’t know all those individuals, but you have the ability to have a little bit of influence for a significant percentage. Now you have some other universities that are quite tiny. I’ll give you an example. There is a school in San Diego called Point Loma Nazarene. It’s a very tiny school in San Diego.

Mickey: There’s about 2,500 to 3,500 students that go there. It’s very likely that on social media you’re connected to your entire school right there. It depends on the type of individual that you are, but there’s a huge difference based on the university that you go after. Most brands want to focus on the big schools because big schools mean more impressions, and more people to see it.

Mickey: We’ve very rarely will have the university come to us, excuse me, a brand come to us and say, “I really want to go after this one specific small school.” Unless they have a store there, like a franchise might have a restaurant or some type of brick and mortar, it’s very rare that the smaller universities see a lot of branded engagement.

Sherry : That’s very interesting. My mind is thinking about that. As you talk about this with this Devo, and obviously I know some of this.

Are there any risks or challenges when you’re talking about college or working with college influencers?

Mickey: The biggest risk is in the control. You want to be authentic. You want the brand to be spoken about in a way that doesn’t feel like an advertisement, but there’s a risk when you let the student say or do whatever they want. Anytime they have the ability to talk about a product, if they’re being paid for it, you have to make sure that before they submit their posts, you give it a once over. Make sure that they’re not saying anything that either is not true, making sure that they are not bringing in images that could either be negative, and this could be simple things the students don’t even realize.

Mickey: Maybe they’re wearing a specific shirt that has a message that can be misconstrued. Brands are very careful, especially in today’s age with how someone that speaks on their behalf is actually representing themselves, and that to me is the biggest challenge when working with college students, when using them as social influencers is they might not understand the implications if they make a statement that is not true, and then it becomes a nightmare.

Sherry : I mean, look, it happens once in awhile, but someone misses a deadline, but with college, aren’t you competing with like, “Oh I missed this deadline for our campaign, because I was in exams” or “my prom,” or aren’t there deadline issues that they’re missing?

Mickey: You’d be surprised. The students that want this type of work after we’ve met them, we take a look at how they represent themselves. If they truly believe that this is something for them, there’s two sides to it. We either have to take a look at their social history. I like to use Instagram as a barometer for when’s the last time you posted, how much engagement do you have on maybe your last 10 posts to get an idea, because sometimes certain pieces of content will get a different type of response, what type of audience do you have based on what you’re promoting? Are you just taking selfies, and people just like it no matter what, or do you take pictures of your food, and who are you and how important is your social life to you and your audience?

Mickey: We take a look at that first and we say to ourselves, “Okay, this is an individual that is proactive. This is somebody that understands how to use their social influence,” and then what we do is we try to cater the program around the student. You’re absolutely right that deadlines can come and go, not just to college students. Deadlines happen to corporations. Sometimes they come and go. I believe that if you’re working in the college space, you cannot ask a student to work around you.

Mickey: We actually have to change, and make sure we work around them. What that means is I might give a student an entire month to give me what I need, not a week, not a day, because of that very same reason, and yes, can they miss that deadline at the end of the month? Absolutely, and it happens and we fire them. I don’t have tolerance for giving you an entire month to do something and things can happen, boyfriend breaks up with you, girlfriend breaks up with you, you’ve got a huge test.

Mickey: Life happens and it happens to everybody. We just try to change the way we think, because we’re dealing with somebody that is in a pressure cooker environment. I’m not in school. The stressors that I have in my life are different than a 19 year old young woman, or 19 year old young man in a college campus. Life is so different, and they may not realize that a breakup to them is the ends of the world, and it’s certainly traumatic, but it’s not the end of the world, but my success is in their hands. We have to change the way that we operate to make sure that we’re not screwed, because something happened to them.

That is amazing feedback. Thank you. I think that’s really helpful insight.

Mickey: It’s hard to do, and honestly, it’s one of the things that when I talked to brands about how to market to college kids, I have to explain to them that these are not your employees. These are just kids looking for opportunities. I’ve had brands say to me, “Well, if this person is working for us, I don’t want them working for anybody else,” and I say, “Listen, really? Why?” You can’t force them. You’re not paying them enough for them to not do that. The energy that you’re going to try to do to prevent them from doing another gig isn’t even worth your energy. Just let them do what they need to do.

Mickey: Work with them. Have a casual conversation, and lay out expectations. Show them while you are more valuable, but be understanding of the fact that they’re at a point in their life where they’re going to try everything they can to be successful. Don’t stand in their way. Be an advocate for them, and you’ll be surprised at just how much that means to that individual, and it works. Treat them like who they are. They’re a young college kid. I mean, don’t disrespect them, but just understand who you’re dealing with.

And I think there’s just massive opportunity as these college kids leave college, their follower counts just going to continue to grow.

Mickey: Without a doubt. If this is something that’s important to them, and we’re going to see how the social influencer world changes over the next few years. I mean, maybe we’ll dive into this a little bit, but as we see Instagram is starting to change the way they are showing metrics. We’ve got a lot of people that focus on vanity metrics. I’ve got this many followers. I have this many likes and these things, while they seem to be important, it looks like they do have ramifications, but the students that are smart, and the students that understand that this actually is a viable business for them, they will absolutely thrive, but they just have to be aware of who they are, and how they’re promoting themselves, because brands are looking at that as employers are as well.

Sherry : Oh yeah. I mean the first thing that I look at when I’m about to hire someone is what their Instagram and Facebook and LinkedIn and every other channel looks like.

Mickey: Without a doubt.

Sherry : See, you talk about all these things that are going to change. I agree with you, especially the news about Instagram and likes.

We’re approaching a new year, and I’d be curious to know what do you think is a trend that’s going to happen for 2020 with influencer marketing?

Mickey: That’s a great question. when I take a look at what these large social channels are doing, when I take a look at Snapchat and Instagram, to me, even though Facebook still is at the top, when you look at all the numbers of how many people have Facebook accounts, how many people are joining Facebook, the growth, the amount of content that gets created, Facebook is still right at the top.

Mickey: Even though when I take a look at the engagement that our students have, and the channels that they prefer to post on, it’s still Instagram and it’s still Snapchat, but what I’m noticing is that Instagram, starts to take insight from what Snapchat is doing. They’re all learning from each other. One of the things that I feel will start to be really popular, is going to be the stories that these social channels allow people to have, and then being able to build upon those stories.

Mickey: We used to have ephemeral stories from Snapchat. You create a story, it disappears. Now, we’re finding that Instagram allows people to create a content story that lives in their profile. I believe that more video, the ability for people that understand video to be able to take advantage of it. I think that live video will become more popular as it becomes easier as people understand it as a platform.

Mickey: I think that the only way that something will really become trendy is if there is a way to quantify it based on is this working? Whether that’s a metric on number of use and then create a revenue stream out of it. How can I monetize the things that I’m doing? I’m more looking to what are the platforms going to start doing from a monetization standpoint to help dictate what’s going to happen from social media, and I think it’s going to go more towards video.

Sherry : And when you talk about monetization, I know we get this a lot, particularly from direct response brands.

How do you justify ROI? It’s awareness, it’s engagement, it’s social conversation, but at the end of the day, how do you figure out your ROI?

Mickey: When it comes to the college space, there’s two questions I try to get from a client. They’re not always willing to give it to me, but I try to explain to them why I want this information. I asked if they can give me their cost per acquisition, and the lifetime value of their consumer, and the reason that those numbers are important is because when you create an event on campus, let’s say it costs $10,000 in just rough numbers, you’re not getting that $10,000 back the next day. You might not get that $10,000 back in three weeks. You might not get that $10,000 back in a year.

Mickey: It really comes down to so many variables. So that’s why I always take a look and I say, “All right, if your objective is sales, everybody needs sales. Without sales, there’s no business. If they say, “Oh, awareness is important to us. Yeah, awareness is obviously important, because if nobody knows who you are, nobody can buy your product, but at the end of the day, if no one is buying their product, even if people know who they are, they’re not going to be in business.”

Mickey: I tried to talk to a customer, and I say, “Listen, can you share with me your cost per acquisition, and can you share with me the lifetime value of a consumer,” because what that allows me to do is tell a story based on other metrics that I’m gathering. Sure, you have a restaurant and your restaurant happens to be a chain. Well, what’s the average check that somebody has? Well, the average check is $12 okay, great. Well we’re going to do an event and there’s going to be 5,000 people there.

Mickey: Are we going to get all 5,000 people to go to the restaurant? Absolutely not, but we’re trying to tell a story that says there is a possibility that over the next year while they’re in school, we’re able to help predict the fact that these people can become a customer and over their lifetime, either at this university you will see a return on your investment. It’s hard, but it’s really interesting in the college space, because you’re forcing the brand to think a little bit differently about what it means to get a customer, because they’re not necessarily a customer at that very moment. That’s the way I try to break, bring the conversation.

Sherry : Well, thank you. Very helpful, and I think we’re going to be short on time. I just always ask this last question, and it doesn’t have to be in the college category, but….

Can you tell us an influencer you love to follow but it hate to admit that you do.

Mickey: I love food, and I happen to follow a guy that is actually Canadian. His name is Noah Cappe, and Noah Cappe is the host of a show on Food Network where he goes to carnivals, it’s called Carnival Eats, and he’s just a kooky guy, but I think that he’s really funny. I think that his interest in crazy audacious food is something that I have an interest in, but it’s just a weird thing to follow.

Mickey: I follow him in his things that he does, but it’s bizarre, because he’s not really, well, I guess he’s an influencer, but it really comes down to, I guess how we define influencer. For me, he’s a silly guy that I follow, but there’s really nothing special about him except for the fact that I think he’s pretty cool.

Sherry : That’s great. Well, I’m going to check him out, and Mickey, thank you so much. This has been very insightful. I loved chatting with you today, and going to keep an eye on and continue watching your success at Campus Commandos.

Mickey: I appreciate it very much, Sherry. Thank you.

Sherry : Thank you. Have a great day.