BATTLE. BEGINNINGS.
Tommy Battle and Trent Harrington go back further than Red Brick. Trent managed Tommy’s 2008 campaign — the upset that ended Loretta Spencer’s three-term run as mayor and put Battle in office in a city about to define itself differently. He stayed on as Chief of Staff through 2012, running the re-election from inside City Hall against a rematch with the same former mayor. When Trent founded Red Brick in 2013, Battle was the firm’s anchor political relationship. The 2016 re-election was the first time Red Brick handled every piece of the campaign from strategy to screen.
Tommy Battle is Huntsville’s longest-serving mayor. His tenure has been defined by rapid growth, major economic wins, and a management style that cut through the noise and delivered results. What he needed was not a politician’s brand. A leader’s brand. The difference matters, and it had to show up on every piece of mail, every TV spot, and every yard sign that hit the city.
THE BRAND.
The brand did what most political brands fail to do: it said something true. “Battle. Works.” was not a slogan cooked up in a conference room. It was a statement of record. Tommy Battle had already been in office. The campaign just had to point voters back to results they could see.
The system was direct, durable, and built to scale. It sharpened Tommy Battle’s political identity without drifting into noise, clutter, or consultant nonsense.
What the brand did not do: rely on promises. Every element was built around a record that existed. That is why it held.
“Battle. Works.” condensed the whole argument into two words. The typography was bold, the palette was tight, and the tone was simple without feeling simplistic. Every piece of the campaign reinforced the same idea: this administration produced results.
It did not ask voters to imagine what Tommy Battle might do. It reminded them what he had already done.
“A Leader That Works.” answered the rest.
THE STRATEGY.
The 2012 campaign was already a win, but it was expensive and it ran long. We went back to the data, tightened the timeline, and built a more surgical approach for every cycle that followed.
The strategy stripped outdoor and print advertising entirely. Every dollar was allocated to television, where the message could be controlled, measured, and optimized. The result was a campaign that cost less, ran faster, and performed better.
Half the time. Half the cost. A higher margin of victory. That is not luck. That is a system.
That efficiency also demonstrated something harder to quantify: that the right message, built right, compounds. It does not need to be rebuilt every cycle.
THE ELECTION.
Three elections. Three wins. The 2008 upset came at 56–44, knocking out a three-term incumbent. 2012 returned an 80.6% result — the largest margin in Huntsville mayoral history. 2016 came in at 80.7%, on a campaign that ran half as long and cost half as much as 2012.
When the strategy is right, efficiency and performance are not in tension. They compound.
The brand held across all three cycles because it was built on something immovable: Tommy Battle’s actual record. A slogan invented in a conference room erodes under pressure. A brand built on truth gets stronger every year it is true.
Trent did not just help win a campaign. He helped build a political brand durable enough to win twice at 80%, bigger the second time, with less spent getting there.
THE WORK.
A dozen spots. Each one built on the same discipline: clear message, right medium, no wasted motion. These were not ads trying to be clever. They were built to move voters from doubt to confidence.
THE TAKEAWAY.
Political campaigns are the most pressure-tested form of marketing that exists. There is a hard deadline. The audience is skeptical. The competition is actively working against you. The result is binary: you either win or you do not.
Trent was one of the first people Tommy Battle brought into the campaign. That matters because winning a campaign and building a brand require the same discipline: a clear message, ruthless focus on what works, and the confidence to cut everything that does not.
That principle has carried into every engagement since: corporate rebrand, crisis communications, economic development pitch. The category changes. The discipline does not.