A three-year-old Columbus firm is forging a new path in branding by developing browser themes that fans can download for their favorite sports teams, news sites or other entities.
Brand Thunder, founded in 2007 by former AOL/Netscape marketer Patrick Murphy, has provided themes -- or skins -- to more than 250 brands, including 60 NCAA universities.
"Brands are looking for new ways to engage their audience," says Murphy, the company's CEO. "Great brands are building these destination sites . . . but we all know people are getting their content elsewhere. So, how do these brands embrace their users, no matter where they are on the web?"
RSS feeds, Twitter feeds and Facebook updates can be built into brand themes, providing users with up-to-the-minute information about the goings on of their favorite brands -- and driving them to that organization's website, Murphy says.
"The Huffington Post one was one of our first clients. The average reader maybe visits their site three times a day. But we found if they were using our browser, usage was about 20 times a day."
The company shares advertising and merchandising revenue with clients based on clicks from within browser. But the principal revenue comes from the search function, enhanced by a recent partnership with Bing, which becomes the default search engine when a skin is downloaded (Murphy says users can easily change to a different engine afterward).
"As soon as that person clicks a sponsored link, Bing just made a buck or two," Murphy says -- and Brand Thunder earns a percentage.
Two and a half years ago, Brand Thunder received $350,000 from
TechColumbus, and more recently received $1 million from the
Third Frontier's Ohio Innovation Loan Fund. The company is closing on a second round of investment from
North Coast Angel Fund and
Ohio TechAngels.
Brand Thunder currently has seven employees -- three outside of Ohio -- but expects to add up to a dozen more in the next three to four years.
Source: Patrick Murphy, Brand Thunder
Writer: Gene Monteith