Why The Rebrand? A Look At The New GTMA

Why do businesses rebrand? For lots of reasons like going after a new audience, feeling outdated, more alignment with what your business is now versus when it began, and even acquiring another business. So, why did GTMA rebrand? For all of those reasons. 

Going After a New Audience

GTMA has a rich history of over 10 years of marketing excellence and in that time we’ve been fortunate enough to work in a lot of different market sectors including real estate, hospitality, wine and spirits, and online retail. Now we’re expanding into technology startups, entertainment brands, and a whole bunch more, so we didn’t feel our current rectangle logo really “spoke” to those different market sectors. 

Additionally, as we’re hired to create branding for businesses looking to tell a fresh story, it’s important that our brand remains “fresh” and that we reveal our own process in order to hopefully inspire future clients to walk through this exciting process with us.

Outdated Look & Feel

The evolution of the GTMA logo is downright staggering. But like the rings of a tree trunk, it tells a story of where we came from and where our agency is today — grown up, standing tall, and breathing life into our community.

We went from a vertical box representing a building to a minimalist version of a building amid a skyline to a completely minimal rectangle, to now a waterfall of letters that embrace the many variations of what our acronym stands for.

Why? Because when you start a business you think you know who you are. Then challenges come, curveballs are thrown at you, and you either adapt or you go away. We adapted and are blessed to still be in business, but we are by no means the same business we were when we began this adventure…and that’s okay.

That said, our business is built to amplify other businesses. That, in a sense, is the function of a digital advertising agency. As such, we chose our two primary colors to be “neutral” hues that are usually meant to highlight other colors. Black and white are core to our brand as we stand behind and support other brands by helping them create and tell their authentic story. The bright blue, yellow, and orange of our past represented a young, ambitious, fun, and even risk-taking brand. Now, black, white, with our accent color of yellow, represents a more established brand here to support other brands. We know our place in this world as the tellers of stories and not usually the subjects, and yet our yellow is a reminder that we, too, know how to stand out from the crowd.

Agencies Are Their Worst Client

Another reason for our rebrand is that it was time to finally dedicate some resources to ourselves. 

You know how they say doctors are the worst patients? Well, agencies are their worst clients. We never have time to work on ourselves because we’re always distracted working for all of your clients! This is probably a good thing, but a hard thing to deal with when you’re trying to allocate resources and decide who should work on what project. A paid project usually sounds a lot better than a project that is more of an investment with possible future dividends. 

This investment in ourselves establishes our conviction that we’ll be here for another 10 years continuing to innovate in our storytelling techniques and pursuing our mission of breathing life into our employees and our community. Therefore, we felt now was a good time to memorialize this 10 year anniversary by refreshing our look.

Our Acquisition of Indevver

“The good-to-great leaders understood three simple truths. First, if you begin with who, rather than what, you can more easily adapt to a changing world.”  — Jim Collins, Good to Great

We are so thrilled to have the Indevver team join GTMA, adding years of experience to our leadership team with Jeremy Ross as our new Web Director. When the conversation with Jeremy began, we had already started revising our brand. Accepting the invitation to join forces was the perfect capstone event to time our transition and officially rebrand.

This acquisition provided the opportunity to realign our mission, vision, values, and goals to better embody the individuals that make up our growing GTMA team. Our people are our business. Plus, as a full-stack digital powerhouse now offering custom in-house WordPress web development, our old look-and-feel didn’t accurately represent that understanding.

Additionally, our new leadership team needed a fresh start to define the future of the agency as we try and continue to build up our people, tell incredible stories, and bless the community around us.

So, that’s why we rebranded. Thanks for reading and I’ll see you online.