Tony Sweet: Brand Position & Kickstarter

See how brand development leads to a refreshed website, enabling a dream project.

About Project

Dave Trendler and Tony Sweet met during Tony’s 2025 Charleston photography workshop. For years, Tony had wanted to publish his ninth book concept, The Color of Water, but had been unable to find a publisher after his previous publisher was purchased and stopped acquiring new titles.

To decide how to proceed, we consulted with small press publishing veteran Renee Jardine on the likelihood of finding a publisher. A quick survey of Circana revealed a collapse in the market for fine art photography and instructional books over the last decade, yet Tony felt compelled to bring The Color of Water to life. We decided on self-publishing funded through a Kickstarter campaign, which offered three benefits: a new way to engage Tony’s existing audience, a new reason to reach a new audience, and of course to raise funds for the project.

Our Role

Project Management
Brand Development
Brand Messaging
Website UX
Copywriting & SEO
Advertising Campaigns
Kickstarter Project
Email Marketing
Organic Social Campaign

Blockers

First, the website. Tony’s website was built on an aging, photography-specific platform, that was outdated and unable to support a modern digital marketing campaign. The site was not mobile responsive, meaning that 70% of his traffic was being served a desktop site on a mobile device. The photography workshop pages shared very little information and were reusing mismatched URLs.

Second, brand position and awareness. Tony Sweet is known to the photography world for his 35-year career as a celebrated, fine art nature photographer, Nikon Legend Behind the Lens, and photography educator. But he is not well known to a younger audience that might be more likely to back a Kickstarter campaign.

It became clear that Tony needed an updated brand position and a new website before launching The Color of Water Kickstarter campaign.

Brand Messaging & Website UX

While our partner web developer, Wilderness.dev migrated the legacy platform to WordPress and the Kadence WP theme and block editor, we performed an extensive and comprehensive review of the fine art photography education market. We identified Tony’s top competitors, complementary influencers, and performed a deep dive into the keywords and influential brands and personalities in the space.

We reimagined Tony’s website as an introduction of this acclaimed educator to a younger audience, writing fresh copy for 6 key landing pages plus all photography workshops.
We analyzed the leading photography workshop providers to identify the key elements users are expecting and worked with Tony and his workshop partner Susan Milestone to build out far more informative–and search engine friendly–workshop pages.
We did the production work on 9 key landing pages (Workshops, five workshops, Instruction, About, The Color of Water), and all the on-page SEO.
In anticipation of the upcoming Kickstarter and supporting marketing campaigns, we set up digital marketing tracking scripts for Google Analytics 4, a user-behavior analysis platform, Google Ads conversion tracking, Meta Pixel and custom conversions, and tied it all together using Google Tag Manager.

See the new TonySweet.com or view a selection in the gallery below.

Key Landing Pages

We wireframed, wrote copy, prepared imagery, and produced 6 key landing pages including the home page, photo workshops pages, The Color of Water book page, and the Kickstarter campaign including all reward tiers.

TBA

Growth in Organic Search Traffic

While the site’s content platform is minimal, we expect the photo workshops to earn more traffic from search engines thanks to on-page SEO and the new, mobile-friendly platform.

TBA

Growth in Overall Site Traffic

The integrated content marketing campaign will be Tony Sweet’s first digital marketing effort.

The Color of Water

With the new, improved, and mobile-friendly site launched, we turned to The Color of Water project.

Renee Jardine helped develop the book concept with Tony while award-winning graphic designer Vicki Hopewell created the book interior layout and design, cover design, and sales materials as seen below.

Pricing out the project with domestic and overseas printers, Jardine offered several options on paper weight, binding, printing options, and production timing. Tony selected a premium product, setting a 14-week production time after the Kickstarter campaign.

Kickstarter Setup & Advertising Campaigns

To help Tony set his Kickstarter fundraising goal, we helped develop the backer rewards tiers and their pricing and associated costs. We helped set up the campaign project page to meet Kickstarter best practices for copy, imagery, video, and tracking pixels. Take a look at The Color of Water Kickstarter campaign.

We created advertising campaigns for Google Ads and Facebook/Instagram, determining the campaign strategies, ad groups/asset groups, audience targeting, copywriting, creative generation (imagery and templated video), and ad production. We used audience targeting signals developed during the brand development phase of the project, including an exhaustive keyword list. These campaigns target Tony’s existing audience and prospecting audiences of photographers, showing beautiful, compelling ads that feature endemic copywriting and Tony’s truly spectacular photography.

See a selection of ad creative imagery below.

In-House Promotions

We developed and produced a dedicated email blast and 60-day organic social media campaign for Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, X/Twitter, and YouTube with a focus on quality and not quantity. This effort included outreach to well-known photographers, sharing sample pages of the book prepared by our team to secure endorsements and their support for the Kickstarter campaign with social shares and collaborative posts. Examples and imagery coming soon.

Results

The Kickstarter campaign and supporting in-house promotions and ad campaigns have just started running, but we will update the status here. Curious to see the Kickstarter project? Take a look at The Color of Water Kickstarter campaign.