Silicon Valley-style brand influenced investors and industry buyers
Spartan’s influence-driven website, videos, and presentation decks drove $20M in funding and deeply engaged Top 5 automakers and OEMs.
Branding
Digital Strategy
Content Strategy
Copywriting
Design
Web Development
Video Production
The challenge
Influencing the investment market and attracting a narrow but highly influential audience
Spartan was poised to enter the market with biomimetic automated vehicle sensing tech, and their revolutionary approach would render commercially viable, semi-autonomous vehicles a reality while also accelerating Level 5 autonomous hardware.
Investors and buyers, however, had grown fatigued by years of investment losses from broken Level 4 LIDAR promises. What’s more, radar’s true potential was poorly understood by the industry, and Spartan would have to combat its perception as a hardware dead-end.
How would Spartan demonstrate its relevance and attract the attention of top automakers, heavy equipment manufacturers, and mobility-sensing hardware manufacturers?
The solution
A behavioral-driven, Silicon Valley-style brand—sans the vaporware b.s.
Like many tech start-ups, Spartan was moving fast.
While the sophistication of its tech was growing by leaps and bounds, thanks to its small, exceptionally talented team, it lacked the brand presence to match. Spartan needed to appear more mature than it was when it was pushed out of stealth mode—and it needed to influence highly-targeted investor and manufacturer leadership audiences, fast.
What’s more, Spartan needed to pull radar out of the dustbin and convince audiences this decades-old tech offered a promising path forward.
To achieve these goals, Firebrand created:
- An evidence-based influence strategy that carefully defined audience preferences and biases, nurtured trust in Spartan’s deep domain expertise, reignited interest in radar, and reinforced its value proposition—“not more data, but better information”
- A savvy, modern website befitting the best in the Silicon Valley space
- Arresting animated and live-action videos that educated and excited target audiences
- Influence-driven presentation decks that communicated the rocketing-to-unicorn potential of Spartan to investors—and a direct path to commercializing autonomy to manufacturers
The work
A bold, Silicon Valley-style brand
The results
Deep engagement with key audiences
- Our influence-driven presentation deck drove $20M in four months (extension and Series A)
- The brand we created generated deep engagement with Top 5 automakers and OEMs, audiences critical to Spartan’s future growth
- Our work attracted the attention of key media, earning TechCrunch, FrieghtWaves, Transport Topics, and Automotive Newss
“These guys are fantastic, which is why I wanted to bring them in right away. They’re the first guys I called when I knew I was going do a start-up with Nathan.”
— Blake Gasca, CRO & Founder
Why Firebrand?
Branding, experiences, and content that creates impact
Before teaming up with Spartan’s CEO, the company’s CRO engaged Firebrand to develop another OC-based, Silicon Valley-style brand—MuHu. Witnessing first-hand the power of Firebrand’s behavioral marketing framework in driving investor interest, he brought the agency in to serve as an embedded part of the Spartan marketing team.
With two decades of behavioral marketing, web app, and branding experience in the transportation tech space, Spartan relied on Firebrand to take the organization out of stealth mode and launch it into the stratosphere.