Performance Marketing (PM), a West Des Moines-based creative agency, decided to take a different approach to celebrating their 10-year anniversary. Rather than throwing a big celebratory party, they took a staff poll to find ideas that would give back to the community.
One such idea was the creation of PM Underground, a project that is one part-coworking environment and one part-mentoring relationship. Jodi Stevens, a PM account representative who is working with PM Underground, explained the project. “It’s really kind of to give a boost to people who might not be able to afford to pay for a shared space, yet. It’s a temporary solution, so, we only let people stay [on a] case-by-case basis for close to a couple months…to keep with the entrepreneurial spirit.”
PM Underground’s first participant is Kallisto Video Productions (Twitter: @KallistoVP), which is comprised of Justin Smith and Sam Ites. Sam described his company’s focus. “We’re specializing in High Definition Internet video. We see a huge opportunity, corporately, to really sort of change how things have traditionally been marketed. That’s our idea, we’re kind of learning and going at it on the fly and it’s been a lot of fun.”
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As part of PM Undeground, PM offers desk space, internet access and other office facilities to Kallisto, but Sam sees a more intangible benefit from the relationship. “It’s also good for the networking aspect. We were working out of a home office before and were trying to setup clients and get exposure and everything and if we have a good idea we can have access to clients at PM and also be involved in some meetings and discussions.”
Sam continued, “We thought, ‘How are we going to really expand our business goals? Is it going to be sitting in our home office just the two of us or would it be more beneficial to be sitting among an entire organization of other creative professionals having these sorts of discussions?’ So we definitely jumped on the opportunity and we’re excited about it.”
Performance Marketing doesn’t charge a fee for the PM Underground project but does ask Justin and Sam to contribute five hours of work each week towards PM clients. This, however, opens some additional doors for the startup. Jodi explained, “If they have an opportunity to sit in on a client meeting where we’re brainstorming for new ideas for our clients and they might have an outside, of our internal world here, perspective on a new idea – if they’re able to present it to them and they bite on it – it’s just like we use them as a vendor then and they get paid for that work.”
Now that Kallisto has been working out of PM Underground for several weeks, Sam described how the project has been going. “A couple months ago I moved back from San Francisco which is obviously full of creative individuals…it’s refreshing that I found those same people here in this office with the same mindset. To be around it, makes me excited to be here in Des Moines and makes me think there’s a lot of opportunities to do some interesting and important things collaborating with these types of individuals. This ‘PM Underground’ idea allows us to be connected with everything that’s going around.”
Read more on Kallisto, Performance Marketing and the PM Underground project in Juice and the Des Moines Business Record.
Check out Kallisto’s recent production on the 2009 Komen Des Moines Race for the Cure event:
