Mistress Co-Founds Neato

Partners at the advertising agency Mistress today announced the launch of Neato, a collegiate marketing sister company, which will be based next to the agency’s Venice Beach offices and will be led by former Red Bull National Marketing Manager Michael Poznansky, Founder and Managing Director of the new entity.

 

Neato will be targeting businesses interested in the emerging college segment. The shop will operate as an independent sister company.

 

Mr. Poznansky previously worked for seven years with Red Bull out of their Santa Monica headquarters. He began with the energy drink brand as a Student Brand Manager while attending the University of Kansas, and following graduation in 2005 joined the company full-time, leading their National College Marketing Program. At Red Bull Mr. Poznansky developed the national strategy and programming for hundreds of field teams, engineered the recent high profile “Red Bull Airdrop” and ultimately made Red Bull and the college experience synonymous, engaging millions of students each year and turning it into the largest, most impactful and recurrently replicated college platform in the world.  

 

“While the average marketing CMO has likely not stepped foot on a campus in twenty years, Mike has been working deep inside universities and colleges on a monthly basis seven years after graduating from his alma matter,” said Christian Jacobsen, Co-Founder/Partner at Mistress. “No one understands the collegiate universe as well as he does. He’s been instrumental in building up Red Bull’s best-in-class collegiate strategic approach and he will bring that wealth of experience to his new position running NEATO.”

 

 “College is an extremely valuable space for brands. It’s entry point in to adulthood, where rituals, habits, purchase behaviors and brand loyalties are built and sustained,” said Mr. Poznansky. “The audience is a revolving door of 19 million young adults, wielding over 70 billion dollars in spending power. Companies across all categories are beginning to grasp how compelling this segment is and I look forward to working with the Mistress team to make NEATO their ultimate destination”

 

The new sister company is the latest stage in Mistress’s singular evolution as a marketing company that acts like a talent and idea incubator, modeled after the high tech companies that neighbor the agency in Silicon Beach, a section of Los Angeles that is rapidly emerging as a mecca for tech startups and majors, including Google and Facebook, which recently opened offices here.

 

Mistress has been building a network of interrelated sister companies, including Bastard, a production and event company that launched last year, and Tarot, a trend hunting unit that will launch later this month, in order to offer diversified and unique marketing and content creation services for brands, primarily targeting millennials; consumers born between 1980 and 2000.

 

“Neato’s ambition is to be the Mistress of youth marketing - the fresh, appealing alternative to other more traditional shops in the marketplace,” said Mr. Jacobsen. “This is not a collegiate promotional entity but one focused on insight, strategic planning and head-turning execution.”

 

Neato’s innovative new website www.neato.is, which also launched today, includes a feature that mimics legal drinking age verification found on most spirits websites. On the Neato site, after registering one’s college graduation date, the system calculates how long it’s been since the viewer’s been on campus and points out significant facts regarding what’s changed underscoring Neato’s tagline: “We never left campus,” reflecting the shop’s position as an agency that is deeply immersed in college culture.

 

The company logo design represents the company’s personality of grown up, organized thinking with a creative, youthful flair.