Along the way, one lesson kept becoming clearer: the tools change, but better marketing still starts with better thinking.

Our Commitment
No hype. No magic formulas. No pretending we have every answer. Just experienced guidance, honest conversations, and a relentless focus on learning what actually works for your business.

My name is Mike Long.

I’ve been working in digital marketing for more than 25 years – long enough to remember when many of the tools businesses depend on today didn’t exist.

I’ve worked across SEO, PPC, Google Ads, web design, email marketing, social media, and digital strategy.

I’ve seen campaigns win.

I’ve watched good ideas fail.

I’ve made expensive mistakes.

And I’ve learned something from all of it.

Marketing is rarely solved by knowing which button to push next.

Over the years, I would ask business owners and people responsible for marketing a simple question:

“Who are you trying to market to?”

Too often, I’d get a blank look followed by some version of:

“Everybody, I guess.”

That answer told me more than almost any dashboard could.

Because if we don’t know who we’re trying to reach, it’s hard to know what message to use, what offer to make, where to advertise, what a good lead looks like, or what Google Ads should actually accomplish.

That’s when I began looking at Google Ads differently.

The campaign is important.

But the thinking behind the campaign matters more.

Search engines changed. Social media arrived. Google Ads evolved. Automation took over more campaign decisions. PMax changed how campaigns are distributed. AI is changing marketing again.

But the fundamental questions remain:

It can’t replace the business thinking behind them

In 2017, I stepped away from the industry to become a full-time caregiver.

It was the right decision.

Professionally, it cost me almost everything I had built.

When I returned in late 2023, I had a choice.

I could rebuild what I had done before.

Start another agency. Sell another service. Build another course.

I didn’t want to do that.

After all those years – and after stepping away from the industry long enough to look at it differently – I wanted to build something I could genuinely be proud of.

Something based on what experience had actually taught me.

That became Brands 2 Ads.

And eventually, The Catalyst.

Marketing information is everywhere.

Courses. Videos. Tutorials. Podcasts. Blog posts. AI answers. Google recommendations. Experts telling you exactly what you should do.

Information isn’t the problem.

Knowing what applies to your business – and why – is much harder.

I wanted to create a place where an owner or marketer could bring a real problem and say:

“Here’s what’s happening. What am I missing?”

Or bring an idea and say:

“This might sound crazy, but what if we tried this?”

Then instead of immediately accepting or rejecting the idea, we could work through it together.

More than 25 years of experience gives me perspective.

It gives me pattern recognition. It helps me recognize mistakes I’ve seen before. It helps me ask questions that someone newer to marketing might not think to ask.

But experience shouldn’t become a reason to stop questioning things.

I don’t want Catalyst to become a room where Mike talks, and everybody else listens.

I want members bringing ideas to the table.

I want someone to challenge an assumption.

I want someone to ask the question nobody else thought to ask.

I want us to be willing to say, “We don’t know.

Let’s find out.”

That’s where things get interesting.

One of the things I want Catalyst to become known for is turning good marketing questions into things we can actually learn from.

The process is simple:

Problem or Question -> Idea -> Strategy -> Experiment -> Results -> Learning -> Playbook -> Next Decision

Not every idea will work.

That’s okay.

A failed experiment that teaches us something can be more valuable than an untested opinion that sounds good.

The goal isn’t to prove we’re right.

The goal is to get smarter.

Customers change. Competitors change. Platforms change. Technology changes. Businesses change.

That’s why you can’t write a strategy once and put it on a shelf.

Inside Catalyst, the Marketing Playbook becomes a living record of what a business believes, what it has tested, what it has learned, what’s working, what isn’t, and what it should explore next.

Every useful conversation can add something.

Every experiment can teach us something.

Every lesson can make the next decision better.

Owner-led businesses often don’t have a chief marketing officer, a research department, a data team, and a room full of specialists.

Sometimes the owner is the marketing department.

Sometimes marketing gets handed to the person on the team who knows the most about technology or social media.

Sometimes someone knows Google Ads very well but has never been taught how to build the marketing strategy behind it.

Those businesses still deserve a place to think through difficult marketing decisions.

That’s the gap Brands 2 Ads and Catalyst are being built to fill.

I want it to become a place where:

We’re going to challenge assumptions.

We’re going to test ideas.

We’re going to learn from the wins and the failures.

And we’re going to keep getting better.

If that sounds like the kind of room you want to be in, I’d like you at the table.

Pull up a chair.

Let’s make it happen.

– Mike Long

Founder, Brands 2 Ads & The Catalyst