Maybe this needs a title of its own.
Tiny Rebellion had humble beginnings. In 1984 Traci Wald and I married the minute we got out of film school. We were both 21 with no clue how to make a living in the world. She was a tutor and assistant to an entertainment manager. The only job I could find was as a messenger delivering packages. I called my dad to complain that I thought the job was beneath my dignity. He verbally slapped me right and said that not working in the presence of any job offer is what lacked dignity. I took the job as a messenger and by the time I left that position I had directed my first commercial for them. I got my fee paid in cash and delivered it to my wife in a brown paper bag on December 23rd and said Merry Christmas. It was a whopping $5,000 and it was a small fortune to us. Over the years that followed we built a production company called Donat/Wald. She directed mostly, but we were auteurs in the truest sense. Both of us writing, editing, producing mostly direct response commercials for the clients that couldn't afford bigger agencies.
It wasn't glamorous work. But it did inculcate a sense of accountability to results. We lived in the constant fear that if our work didn’t perform, we didn’t eat. That made us good at getting it right on the first try. Our success led to more work and we began to win accounts away from global agencies 100x our size. I’ll never forget pitching the ServiceMaster business, the largest home services company in America. Young and Rubicam was their incumbent. They flew their team out on the private jet to defend the business. Traci and I stayed in a Days Inn and set our alarm for 3am to practice our pitch over and over again until the 8am meeting. The Y&R team was a dozen strong. I don’t think any of them were up at 3am. But we took home the business through sheer force of will and plain hard work.
“This is another place a pull quote could live, nice and big If a reader is scanning, this could pull them in, and invite them to read a little closer.”
Over the decades that followed, we took in a brilliant partner and grew into a full-service agency that eventually became Tiny Rebellion. As Tiny Rebellion, we were able to build a company that reflected our values. We always believed that business could be a force for positive change and that was the basis for how we evaluated the clients with whom we worked. It never felt like work. We relished the visionaries whose companies and brands tore asunder old ways of doing things in favor of a better way. eHarmony changed how we found love on planet earth, LegalZoom democratized legal services making them more accessible to more people, Hotwire made travel more affordable, TrueCar brought transparency to automotive retail. We fell in love with our clients. They became our friends and we became their partners. Calling them clients never felt right. We were living our thesis that business could be an accelerator of not just bottom-line growth, but also personal growth. The person you are in business, very much matters. We curated a special group of talented souls in the company that also felt like an extended family.
My work office had more pictures and things from life in it than any room in my home. The roots of my love for the business extended to every person and pixel we touched. I often loved writing the most forgotten about parts of copy on a website. I believed then, as I do now, that we can infuse each word with an energy of truth that is capable of activating a spirit in the most unlikely places, particularly when their guard might be down. As Amit Goswami says, “Creative truth may not be perfect, but it is always beautiful.” These words summarized our philosophy about advertising. Don't search for the angle, or the USP, search for the truth of a brand and there you will find the power of its resonant frequency. Which, like with human beings, is one of a kind and will deliver the answers to all of your other inquiries.
After nearly 30 years we won Ad Age’s Small Agency of the Year. It was a crowning moment that also coincided with me becoming the Chief Marketing Officer of TrueCar, one of our clients that went public the same year. Being CMO of a public company while the CEO of an agency is not for the faint of heart. As I split my time between running the agency and building a marketing program at TrueCar it became evident that I had to make a choice. The calling of serving a company whose mission was to “prove that truth and transparency is a more profitable way of doing business” was just too compelling. Our agency partner of 13 years purchased the agency but Traci and I retained the beloved name that symbolizes so much of what we believe in, Tiny Rebellion, as well as the agency’s creative assets. We knew we would be back, but there were some important learnings ahead that needed to take a different form.
A core group of the brand makers from the agency and I committed our full attention to building TrueCar into what became the largest automotive marketplace for new cars in the industry. During my tenure as CMO and Chief Brand Officer I developed a great appreciation for the challenges heads of marketing confront on a daily basis. It was an epic experience that culminated in a full rebrand of TrueCar in 2019 and early 2020. The entire company rallied to support the effort that was presided over by an incredible marketing team with the creative led by the team of rebels from the Tiny Rebellion days. As the TrueCar sign on the 405 freeway was replaced with the new logo in July of 2020, we knew it was our signal to restart the agency. Our job was done at TrueCar and the next generation of passionate and capable marketers needed their turn to make TrueCar better than they found it.
“Can this be broken into sections like this? Does this bum you out?”
“One last quote here. Last quote they will see before the ending message.”
The new Tiny Rebellion benefits from 5 years of learnings that being client-side gives you. The journey of being the CMO of a company that goes public and endures the kinds of challenges endemic to disrupters forges a different kind of accountability and resilience into your psyche than I learned in my younger years. For starters, you experience first hand the desire to be close to, as Dillan Thomas called it, “the force that through the green fuse drives the flower”. I never wanted middle people filtering the work coming from the makers. It was reinforced that a few industrious linchpins can generate tremendous output. Bloat is the enemy of efficiency. A head of marketing is incredibly distracted with a thousand priorities. Anticipate their needs as a mother does her child’s. And finally, in spite of our fractured attention spans, story still reigns supreme in building brands and compelling people to take action.
In the new Tiny Rebellion we are all makers. Each of us presides over a specific area of expertise, strategy, design, production in all its forms, editorial, and storytelling in all mediums.
What hasn't changed is our passion to help visionaries elevate the world we live in. Now more than ever, business must play its role as a force multiplier of positive change. It is fitting that our first client out of the gate is a company called Ready. They are changing the face of healthcare by bringing responders to the home equipped with technology that by extension brings the physician to the home. Serving the most disadvantaged populations first, Ready knows that when you bring a responder from the community into a home it creates an agent of healing often overlooked in the current system, familiarity, trust, and love.