Meow Wolf, an arts and entertainment company that crafts surrealistic multimedia art exhibitions, is pouring more into marketing—including hiring its first-ever chief marketing officer—as it seeks to extend the reach of its mind-bending experiences.

Kelly Schoeffel, former executive strategy director at agency 72andSunny, is now Meow Wolf's CMO. She reports to CEO Jose Tolosa, who has put a premium on marketing to capitalize on growing interest in the fast-rising brand in advance of the launch of “Meow Wolf Grapevine” near Dallas slated for the summer. 

Plans include building a new national brand identity, continuing Meow Wolf’s evolution from what was once the passion project of a small collective of artists to a major player in the arts and entertainment industry.

With Schoeffel in the CMO post, Tolosa aims to connect new consumers with Meow Wolf and the unique, otherworldly narratives and artistry offered at each exhibition—largely by broadening the Meow Wolf experience to new mediums, including an app currently in development.

“I'm building this team for the long-term [goal] of Meow Wolf becoming a platform for artistic expression,” Tolosa said in an interview. “In this long-term journey that we’re on, the Dallas opening is certainly very important—probably one of the most important things we’re going to do this year—but the hiring of Kelly goes very significantly beyond that.” 

An art collective turned national company

Fifteen years ago, the company today known as Meow Wolf was simply a small group of artists based in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Each of the collective’s seven co-founders brought artistic skills to the group, such as painting, sculpting, writing and live performances, according to Meow Wolf’s website. Beginning in 2008, the artists started displaying their creations in shared exhibitions united by overarching themes that soon began to venture into the surreal. 

In 2016, the collective launched its first permanent exhibition, The House of Eternal Return, in Santa Fe. Collaborating with over 200 local artists, Meow Wolf transformed a former bowling alley into a “mysterious Victorian house which broke time and space.” 

The Santa Fe exhibition alone was fairly successful, drawing in about 1.5 million visitors over its first three years of operation. But the pandemic brought that exhibition to a screeching halt and reduced 2020 to a “year of zero revenue” for Meow Wolf, Schoeffel said. 

It wasn’t until 2021, when Meow Wolf launched two additional permanent exhibitions in quick succession—Omega Mart, a retro supermarket with unnerving, fantastical elements, in Las Vegas; and Denver’s Convergence Station, a strange sci-fi transportation hub—that the company rose to national prominence. 

To promote the openings of those two exhibitions, Meow Wolf partnered with Wieden+Kennedy and director Andreas Nilsson of Biscuit Filmworks to produce short films matching the surrealism of the exhibitions themselves. The Omega Mart film, for example, begins as a seemingly-ordinary grocery store commercial starring Willie Nelson before rapidly devolving into bizarre, borderline nightmarish imagery that eventually reveals Nelson to be a deepfake. 

Similarly, the Convergence Station film invites viewers to “take a trip from reality,” featuring surreal scenes including a woman rapidly aging in mere seconds, an adult male’s head atop a young girl’s body frolicking through a meadow, and a train erupting from a man’s mouth before flying through the air. Meow Wolf’s marketing for the launch of the exhibition also featured unsettling billboards with statements such as, “You’ve already been to Convergence Station.” 

“[Those campaigns] definitely helped catapult Meow Wolf onto a bigger cultural stage, beyond the footprint of the exhibitions at the time,” Schoeffel said. “I think that is how a lot of people found out about the brand, at least in the creative world. The exhibitions themselves are very disorienting and mind-expanding, and the marketing at its best has done that, as well.” 

The majority of Meow Wolf’s marketing, from various online video series to the social media channels for its three exhibitions, is produced and led by in-house teams, she added. For example, Meow Wolf’s marketing team created several “commercials” for bizarre products sold at Omega Mart, including one recalling “Omega Mart Lemons” and apologizing to consumers who may have confused them with actual lemons.

“Our marketing is mostly, frankly, coming from people that don’t have a traditional marketing background,” Schoeffel said. “There's hundreds of people that work here that are creative, or identify as creative or as artists. Corralling a lot of the crazy genius ideas in their heads and making them suitable for marketing usage is part of my job.”

Meow Wolf’s first CMO

Due in part to the company’s growing national presence, Meow Wolf’s three exhibitions collectively drew in a record number of visitors in 2022: 2.6 million, up sharply from the 1.5 million tickets purchased in 2021. The company’s increasing revenue following its pandemic-induced stagnation in 2020 led Meow Wolf to bring on Tolosa as its CEO in early 2022. In turn, Tolosa—who previously served as chief transformation officer at ViacomCBS—has assembled Meow Wolf’s C-Suite over the past 12 months. 

Schoeffel is the most recent addition to the company’s leadership team, officially becoming Meow Wolf’s first CMO in December 2022. 

“Our culture is highly artistic … and our marketing is an extension of that,” Tolosa said. “[That artistry] also needs to be embedded in the person who’s going to lead that team that’s going to execute the deployment of the brand [and] the values that the brand stands for.”

Schoeffel, for her part, never envisioned herself becoming a CMO. Her career prior to joining Meow Wolf revolved around brand strategy and planning at various agencies, including Anomaly and Wieden+Kennedy. And for the past 13 years, she has held several strategy positions at 72andSunny—most recently, executive strategy director—where she worked on campaigns for clients such as Target, United Airlines and Tinder.

But when a friend told her about Tolosa’s hunt for a CMO, Schoeffel instantly contemplated applying for the role. She had previously visited Meow Wolf’s exhibitions and had been “enamored" with its immersive, surreal experiences “for years,” she said. And, from a professional standpoint, she admired the company’s unconventional marketing strategies, as well as its “purpose-driven” partnerships with local artists to create each of its exhibitions—which earned Meow Wolf its B Corp status.

“Meow Wolf is sort of an overlap between the type of brand I like to work for, something I care about in my personal life, and just an unshaped object that I could really put my fingerprints on,” Schoeffel said. “I never wanted to be a CMO—that was not on my bucket list. But here, I get to sort of figure out what that job even means, because [Meow Wolf] is not a traditional brand. It shouldn’t be a traditional marketer.”

Establishing a brand identity 

In just a few months, Meow Wolf will open its fourth permanent exhibition in Grapevine, Texas, located outside of Dallas and Fort Worth. And the company is already planning its fifth exhibition, which is currently scheduled to launch in Houston in the summer of 2024. 

Because ticket sales from these exhibitions comprise the majority of Meow Wolf’s revenue, a large part of Schoeffel’s role will involve marketing the company’s new artistic experiences in a way that builds off the surrealism contained in its past campaigns and simultaneously celebrates the “different dynamics” of each unique exhibition and its surrounding city, she said. 

Meow Wolf’s marketing goals for 2023 extend beyond solely promoting these new, individual exhibitions. Schoeffel’s primary aim is to unite the company’s distinct exhibitions under an overarching, national brand identity. 

“We have to start thinking from a brand perspective more and more, now, in what the brand stands for in people’s minds and in the marketing we put out in the world,” she said. “Everything we've done [in the past] has really been at an exhibition-by-exhibition level, and moving forward, there's going to be a brand layer that stitches it all together.”

Meow Wolf’s first step in bringing together its various exhibitions under a single brand umbrella will revolve around an app the company plans to launch at the end of this year, Schoeffel said. The app will serve as a “content platform” for Meow Wolf, providing an interactive hub to highlight the stories and characters that underscore each of the company’s exhibitions—providing consumers who may not be able to visit the exhibitions with an opportunity to still engage with Meow Wolf, she said.

The company already has a subgroup of fans who have never visited one of its exhibitions but are “still fascinated by the idea” and closely follow the narratives shared across the Instagram accounts of Meow Wolf’s three exhibitions. For example, the Omega Mart account, which has about 124,000 followers, parodies the social media presence of a real supermarket and posts bizarre photos of products and unnerving videos of the store’s “employees.”

“We have really passionate fans and participants that love this brand and want to get on the inside and want to deep dive into the story and understand the art. They don't have a lot of pathways to do that right now,” outside of the exhibitions themselves, Schoeffel said. The app, she hopes, “will give people a way to engage with the brand beyond the four walls.”