Geoff Katz is a creative director and product executive in Palm Springs, California. He is creative director at Fabric Media, where since 2020 he has led connected-television go-to-market for VIZIO and Walmart, and the founder of Stardust + Gravity, the brand strategy, design and production studio he has run as his main practice since the same year. Before that, twenty years inside the companies that built television’s plumbing — Fox and Disney, Watchwith, DIRECTV, TiVo, Excite@Home — usually working on the version that did not exist yet.
At Fabric Media he is creative director for connected-television go-to-market — the advertising business VIZIO and Walmart take to market each year, the events where they announce it, and the film that carries it. At Stardust + Gravity, the studio he founded in 2016 and has run full-time since 2020, he draws identity marks, writes the design systems that keep them alive, builds the publications they run in, and art-directs the rooms the work plays in.
The through-line is that he has sat on both sides of the table. For twenty years he was the one commissioning this work — as an SVP at Fox Networks Group, as chief experience officer at Watchwith, as a product lead at TiVo and DIRECTV. He knows what it costs, what it is worth, and which parts of a pitch are decoration. He now makes it.
The studio’s stated test for its own work is durability — work with a long half-life. A mark has to read at sixteen pixels and at sixty feet. A design system has to survive the departure of the people who commissioned it. A publication has to absorb new work every day with nobody from the studio in the room.
Creative direction for the VIZIO and Walmart connected-television advertising business, from the launch of Platform+ in 2020 through to a reported $800M+ in annual revenue by 2025–26. Six consecutive NewFronts, shot on a virtual production pipeline the studio built.
Most of it early enough that the thing being designed did not yet have a name. The pattern is consistent: streaming video, interactive television, addressable advertising and the connected-TV ad stack were each, at the time, the version nobody had built.
As co-chair of the Television Academy Engineering Emmy Awards, he helped recognize Netflix, YouTube and Apple with their first Emmy Awards — the point at which the television industry formally recognized them as television. He also successfully advocated for the Primetime Emmy categories that recognize interactive and streaming media, which is why those categories exist.
Most engagements begin with a short call and a written brief read back to the client. Two-week sprints are normal. A typical identity engagement runs three working sessions with the client, then a presentation to whoever has to approve it, one round of changes, and final files. Proposals are published in full, with a worked example of every deliverable, so a committee can see where the work lands before choosing anyone.
The studio names and links every collaborator on a project. It does not subcontract credit.