In early 2006, Tremor Network, a small rich media ad network acquired Dynadco, a small technology company with a tool that allowed online video publishers to dynamically insert ads from any ad source. Tremor wanted to get into video and it was a great match.

Dynadco was the brainchild of Jesse Chenard and I was fortunate to have helped him get the company up and running. When I had the chance to run marketing and creative services for Tremor and work with Jesse full-time I didn’t think twice. When we started, Tremor had less than 10 full-time employees.

By late 2008, less than three years later, Tremor had more than 100 full-time employees. And our advertising, publicity and industry standing had risen exponentially. In the meantime, every conference, every sales call, I never tired of hearing people say “Tremor Media? You’re everywhere!”

branding for startups = key for success

Your brand is your promise. Internally, your brand gives you an organizing principle around who you are now and who you want to be when you grow up. Externally, it is your face. It means everything to how you will be perceived in the marketplace and by investors.

For Tremor to reach a new level of media buyer, it needed a clearer and more consistent promise that would be more relevant to those buyers. We felt we had some equity in the word Tremor with the existing customer base, but the word Network had a lot of baggage. Tremor Media had more gravitas. More oomph.

But I felt there was also a negative association with the idea of tremors – obviously earthquakes can be tragic. So to mitigate that, and to clearly establish a new brand idea in customers’ minds, I wanted to play with the idea that we were “shaking things up.” And I introduced the tag-line: “a seismic shift in advertising.”

discovery - it all starts with the creative brief

All of Tremor Media’s messaging and design for the next three years evolved from that branding work. And, as usual, it started with a well-written creative brief. The creative brief is key to get the stakeholders on the same page.

Out of that creative brief, I focused on a few areas for a mood board: rhythm, energy and innovation. A mood board is a helpful (if not essential) tool in the brand creation process. It is literally a board or poster with visual and verbal elements (images, textures, screenshots, colors, logo, key words – mood) that convey the brand’s essence.

When you look at that original mood board, you can see a number of the elements that lead to the logo, repeating multiples, a sense of movement and rhythm. You can also see how strongly seismology helped lead me there.

You can also see how that became the “grid” that is used in every Tremor Media communication. The grid becomes the driving design element for the website, marketing collateral and sales decks, corporate identity materials, advertising, booth design and so on.

getting funded: the dog and pony show

My main focus at Tremor initially was all about the funding. Jason (CEO) and Jesse (CTO) were having meetings with venture capitalists almost daily. Besides the branding work, I was creating the investor presentations and pitch materials and keeping them fresh and up-to-date. I was also going to investor meetings myself. In fact, I introduced them to their first investor.

Obviously funding is the life blood of a start up that wants to scale up quickly. And having gone through the process several times as well as having seen it from the investment banking side, I would say that, although it’s rather formulaic, it’s never easy. But in the case of Tremor, it went very smoothly and we ended up with some very bright and engaged investors.

But it doesn’t end there. Don’t forget about good investor relations. It’s critical for early stage companies to keep their investors engaged and well-informed. It helps them to help you.

fail to media plan; media plan to fail

Like the creative brief, in order to create an effective media plan, you have to know your audience. You want to know where they are, where you can reach them and what their expectations are.

I always start every media plan with an industry event calendar. Choose some key events for your audience over the next year and make those milestones in your media plan. For Tremor, I focused on the OMMA events, the Streaming Media events, the iMedia events, NAB, AdWeek New York and a few others.

The calendar is a great way to organize your efforts on multiple media fronts. I like to make a calendar spreadsheet in Excel and then create columns for every type of media. In the case of Tremor, the columns were: events, print ads, online ads, sales & direct marketing, press/media, search.

First I check to make sure I’m not doing too many events at the same time. It’s hard to be effective when resource-constrained. Then I fill in the other columns based around the events and build themes. So, for example, if there’s an OMMA Video show that we’re sponsoring, then I want to make sure that I’m covered that week with print and online ads, as well as stories or columns for PR some form of direct marketing, some social media or word of mouth and some SEM.

will there be lunch?


First of all, it’s very important to go to meetings with the salespeople. They can expense lunch. Seeing your sales team in action can make all the difference. It’s so helpful to fully understand their sales process, the sales cycle, the audience, the setting.

The standard presentation I created for Tremor sales was about 12 slides, but there were libraries of slides that could be mixed and matched within the core deck – kinda like Garanimals. For example we had about 10 channels (like Auto, Women’s, Entertainment, etc.) and we created slides for each channel. So if a sales person was going to meet with a prospect or client who fit the Auto channel, they could pull that slide in.

Then for high-profile prospects, we would customize the slides by incorporating the brand we were pitching and creating live demos using their creative assets. But for most of the day-to-day presentations, I set it up so the salespeople had the tools they needed to handle it themselves.

be everywhere

The initial goal at Tremor was to build the brand. By establishing our name and our message in the marketplace with frequency and targeting, I was able to give our sales team the coverage they needed. And each time the door opens at a new prospect we wanted them to say: “Tremor Media? You’re Everywhere!”