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!”

Here are some key areas I focused on at Nasdaq as well as with other companies that I’ve supported large numbers of sales people:

Audience.

It’s critical to understand how the sales process works and who the audience is. It matters if people present sheets of paper or show presentations on laptops or projected or whatever. I find it very helpful to go to as many sales pitches as possible while building sales materials so you have a real feel for the context of the pitches. The sales people don’t know what to tell you about what they need and it means more to see it for yourself. Like mini-focus groups. With lunch (sometimes).

Message.

If they had one elevator ride (you know the drill) to convince the prospect, what would they want them to know? If there’s one thing the prospect should take away from the pitch, what would it be? Does it sync with your unique selling proposition? Do you have proof points to support that? The message absolutely must be consistent.

Look and Feel.

Whatever the medium, whatever software you use, it has to be on brand. The presentation/collateral should look like it comes from the same company as everything else. We’ve all seen companies who have slides that look like an excel spreadsheet, a website that looks like a chinese menu and handouts that look like a futuristic travel agency. Look and feel consistency is as important as message consistency. Without it you lose major credibility points with prospects.

Templates.

The easier you can make the process of putting together each presentation and/or sales kit on the fly for your sales people, the less customization you’ll have to do. I find you can get many sales teams to be fairly self-sufficient as long as you and or a designer can help with higher profile pitches. I like to put together a core deck of slides and a standard kit of sales materials and provide a library of as many standardized pages as you can that the sales people can pull from. Then continue to add to the library as your team adds to their arsenal. But always keep the core presentation as a complete presentation that anyone could just use as-is.

Media Training.

Sales people are good at raising the level of excitement and closing the deal, but they may or may not be great at presenting. I like to work individually and in groups with sales people to help them raise their games. You’d be surprised how quickly they can improve with some coaching about staying on message. It’s hard for them to know how they look in front of people and your feedback can be invaluable. Just throw some tough questions at them and help them learn not to squirm under pressure. Don’t forget, public speaking is the number one fear.

During the tech boom of the ’90s, Nasdaq grew from an acronym into a rather slick and faceless technology brand. While our competition at the NYSE had the amazing theater of the trading floor with traders gesticulating wildly (at least that’s the perception in popular culture) complete with the “ringing of the bell,” Nasdaq was an unintentional brand that had grown up too quickly. Everyone knew about the Nasdaq stock quotes because of the ticker at the bottom of their TV and computer screens but people did not have a visceral sense of the brand promise - only a number.

The early 2000s was a critical time in the history of the Nasdaq brand. As creative director starting in 2001, I set out to bring human elements into a tech brand at a difficult moment in history. I created and implemented a broadly integrated communications plan to align 360 degrees of audience perception with many disparate business needs and media requirements.

when you touch nasdaq, what do you feel?

My first goal was to bring humanity to the Nasdaq brand. Every single communication and creative execution brought personality into the work. Starting with the work we did with McKinney & Silver you can see faces and organic textures dominating. We rebuilt the brand architecture from the ground up, including brand essence, voice, brand guidelines and corporate identity.

where are the people?

While working on the brand essence, I flew down weekly to our agencies’ offices in North Carolina where I would stand in front of walls of images and ask the same question: where are the people? We had to get it right. The “Visionaries” work that came out of this process was all about real people and it informed everything else about the brand.

visionaries - who is nasdaq?

We kicked off the Nasdaq “Visionaries” campaign with a series of TV spots (which ran for years and well over $100m in media buying) featuring CEOs of Nasdaq-listed companies. The spots (shot by the venerable Albert Watson), featured visionary leaders at Nasdaq companies telling personal stories about their own inspiration. He shot them with a lot of close-ups and with gorgeous lighting. The effect is very humanizing.

These commercials did much to change the perception of Nasdaq. Now our brand was about people. Real people.

Using the untapped potential of our rock star CEOs we created a series of dozens of versions based on the Visionaries theme over several years.

Here are a few of my faves:

Nasdaq Visionaries:
Howard Schultz (SBUX), Michael Dell (DELL), Steve Ballmer (MSFT)
“At first, my parents were pretty upset with me when I dropped out of college, but after a while they got over it.” — Michael Dell

Nasdaq Visionaries:
Tom Stemberg (SPLS), Craig Barrett (INTL), John Chambers (CSCO)
“One of the hallmarks of an entrepreneur is to turn adversity into opportunity.” — Tom Stemberg

Nasdaq Innovation:
Jeff Bezos (AMZN), Michael Marks (FLEX), Robert Swanson (LLTC)
“Leaving my job to start amazon.com was a tough decision because we didn’t know if anybody would buy anything online.” — Jeff Bezos

Nasdaq Leadership:
Barry Diller (IACI), Kevin Sharer (AMGN), Carlos Ghosn (NSAN)
“I don’t think you can make up the energy or the passion you have for a business. If you’ve really got it, everybody knows it.” — Barry Diller

how do you translate a successful tv ad campaign into a successful print ad campaign?

Still focusing on the human element, we pushed the idea of quotes from Nasdaq CEOs, in this case, on Nasdaq blue sticky notes. We ran these ads in magazines such as Forbes, Fortune and New Yorker. And we placed them as backlit dioramas in airports that were highly trafficked by our target audiences. In fact, we targeted airports and media outlets where the CEOs and listed companies would see themselves. They loved that!

“Why try to change the world? A better question is ‘Why not?’”
— William Haseltine (HGSI)

websites and the human-computer interaction

The branding work with our agency of record was brilliantly augmented by the work we did to humanize the online brand with our digital agency: digital@jwt. We redesigned four websites, including the flagship nasdaq.com which averaged 3.5 million unique visitors per month at the time.

The challenge of redesigning such a complicated site with so many toolsets that is a vital daily tool for millions of users cannot be overstated. jwt’s remarkable team understood from the start how critical the information architecture and usability would be. We did extensive work creating user profiles, user scenarios, prototyping, wireframing and testing, testing, testing every assumption.

We also brought the brand and those rigorous usability standards to our intranet, our training website and to other sites that brought investor relations tools to our user companies.

the opening bell: giving a 130-year old tradition a new signature

Although the New York Stock Exchange started using a gong in 1871, there were no cameras until the late 1990s. By 2001, the market open had become a daily source of massive media exposure for both NYSE and Nasdaq. But the visual experience of pushing a button left a lot to be desired. So we sought to bring the same humanity into the market open and closing ceremonies.

We chose the experiential branding agency, Imagination, to rebrand the open. Again, we went through extensive rebrand exercises and again, I cajoled everyone to focus on the personal. Imagination’s brilliant outcome was to have the CEO, celebrity, etc. opening the market “sign” the market into activity. In other words, instead of pushing a button or banging a gavel, the person signs their name across the podium and that action — the signature — is what initiates the trading day.

The signature podium can even be used remotely. The signature is simultaneously shown across the seven-story tower in Times Square.

Richard Branson signs to open the market from Davos.

what do you do with the world’s largest video screen?

One of my favorite media toys at Nasdaq was our marketsite in Times Square. In addition to having the world’s largest video screen to play with, we had multiple TV studios and tremendous traffic. I oversaw design work for the tower and created technical standards for advertisers and listed companies to build creative.

September 17, 2001: With a giant OPEN sign over a fluttering American flag, we declared America “Open for Business.” We had spent six days working with hundreds of our listed companies, coordinating with the NYSE to prepare for the first day of trading after the attacks of 9/11. Since our offices were across the street from the World Trade Center, they were within the red zone protected by the National Guard. A small group of us worked out of our SVP’s apartment. In the days that followed, we helped more than 400 of our listed companies execute corporate share repurchase plans to instill market confidence.

August 31, 2001: Michael Jackson’s 43rd birthday. About to tour Europe and Asia. He had more security than Bill Gates, but he hung out in our offices eating cake for hours. I worked with his concert promoters in Paris to create video versions of his posters that they ended up using for his tour. Very exciting! And for historians looking for the moment when celebrity appearances on the stock markets reached a new level, this may be it.

how do you maintain the integrity of a brand across dozens of agencies around the world?

Bring your A game. And have a clear vision. My mantra for this brand was to be human, personal and visionary. It’s also important to clearly understand your audience for every type of communication. And it’s helpful to write creative briefs with every agency.

Because of Nasdaq’s large media footprint, we worked with many different agencies. Part of my job as creative director was to maintain the brand essence across all of them. Evolving from the branding work with McKinney & Silver and the other agencies mentioned above (jwt and Imagination), I worked to steward our message with direct marketing (RTC and others), market research (Y&R, Wirthlin) and others, as well as multiple PR firms and agencies throughout Europe and Asia.

4 sales teams; 80 sales people; one you; now what?

It always presents a challenge to work with large sales teams, but when they have different missions, different messages, different audiences, it becomes even harder to help them create presentations and sales collateral that are consistently on brand, on message and … well … not awful.

Here’s a blog post on some key areas I focused on at Nasdaq as well as with other companies that I’ve supported large numbers of sales people.

experiential marketing:
using events to create a live connection with your brand

Whether it’s at an industry conference or a cocktail party or a product launch or an event you sponsor (to name a few examples) an event can be a super-effective strategy to engage your audience with your brand and clearly communicate your message.

Our largest event was the Nasdaq-100 Open tennis tournament in Key Biscayne. The largest title-sponsored event in all of tennis, the Nasdaq-100 Open was broadcast in 160 countries with over 900 hours of television coverage. It gave us incredible reach to spread the Nasdaq message to investors and it gave us another media platform to use with our companies.

During the tournament, we held a CEO Thought Leadership and Corporate Governance summit. In addition to about 25 Nasdaq CEOs, our invited guests included a governor, senators, congressmen, ambassadors, professors and a think-tank. Our CEOs were able to hold very high level dialogue with actual decision makers. For example, several senators working on the Sarbanes-Oxley legislation were able to hear directly from CEOs at several of the largest corporations in the world exactly what would work and what wouldn’t for good corporate governance and good business practices.

To incorporate the themes from the branding work (humanity, visionaries, quotes, signatures), I flashed relevant quotes in real time on LCD screens at everyone’s tables and around the room. It was fun to see these brilliant minds competing to be the most quotable. Many would approach me during the break to give me their quotes on the topic in advance.

how many patents does that thing need?
market intelligence desk

We found that besides the large amount of marketing and media support, the most critical thing we could provide to our companies was information. So we created the Market Intelligence Desk and the Nasdaq Corporate Services Network. We pulled together all the data sources necessary to be able to give companies information on investor relations, market insight, research, corporate governance and much more in real-time.

During the process, we filed 26 patents and created a sort of Bloomberg-terminal-on-steroids. As with the web sites we built, this required an immense amount of information architecture insight and usability testing, testing, testing.

how does all this work?

Listed companies were arguably our most important constituency, so to finish the case study, I’ll give you some insight into how we won JetBlue’s hotly-contested IPO listing using all the tools I’ve mentioned, in an integrated way. We created a full-day media event in Times Square with JetBlue flight attendants handing out goodies, coordinated with advertising on our tower, a market open, TV interviews in our studio, coverage in Nasdaq magazine (which could also be found on all JetBlue flights), coverage on our website, opportunities to take part in our Visionary TV and print ads as well as the Nasdaq-100 tennis tournament. JetBlue listed on Nasdaq.