Tony Sweet: Brand Position & The Color of Water 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
Challenges
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 Tony’s website was built on an aging, photography-specific platform, that was outdated and unable to support a modern digital marketing campaign.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.
See the new TonySweet.com or view a selection in the gallery below.
6
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.
+79%
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.
+372%
Growth in Monthly Site Traffic
The integrated content marketing campaign will be Tony Sweet’s first digital marketing effort.
The Color of Water Project
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 and his partner Susan Milestone 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. The book production team started work as soon as we achieved the campaign goal.
Campaign Goal
$25,000
Since Kickstarter is an “all-or-nothing” platform, campaigns must achieve the goals they set within a maximum of 60 days or all pledges are refunded to supporters. To help Tony set his Kickstarter fundraising goal, Renee Jardine provided detailed costing from printers for the book production. We helped develop the backer rewards tiers and their pricing and associated costs. With all costs accurately estimated, we develop revenue forecast scenarios at each backer tier to ensure the financial viability of the project. Then we estimated the mix of backer tier pledges to arrive at our campaign goal.
Kickstarter Setup & Advertising Campaigns
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, and LinkedIn with a focus on quality and not quantity. This effort included outreach to well-known photographers. Tony shared sample pages of the book prepared by our team to secure endorsements and their support for the Kickstarter campaign.
Results: Funded!
The Kickstarter campaign and supporting in-house promotions and ad campaigns are live and end on June 12. Curious to see the Kickstarter project? Take a look at The Color of Water Kickstarter campaign and its creative tiers of backer rewards.
7
Days to 50% Funded
Thanks to our coordinated marketing campaign, which integrated email marketing, Google Ads, social media advertising.
30
Days to 100% Funded
The continued pressure of the advertising campaigns plus support from Tony’s network of colleagues helped us achieve 100% funding of our $25,000 goal.
TBA
Dollars over our goal
We are hoping to raise additional funds through the Kickstarter campaign to help share The Color of Water with a broader audience.
Ready for Something New?
Let’s explore the possibilities!