Bio - Tobin (Toby) Trevarthen
Founder/CEO/Narratologist
spatial shift
Tobin (Toby) Trevarthen is the Founder and Chief Narrative Officer of Spatial Shift, LLC – a Narrative strategy design firm based in Napa, California. Toby brings 30 years of executive management knowledge to his pioneering corporate narrative work. His background represents a consistent thread of revenue creation and innovation that spans Fortune 100, scale ups, start ups and non-profit organizations.
Toby is responsible for inventing a narrative design process - Designing for Narrative Whitespace™ - deployed on a global level for companies and foundations who are looking to accelerate their growth, through cultural, organizational and executional alignment. He also just recently pioneered the Narrative Flywheel ™, a holistic framework for helping companies to achieve narrative alignment with their business model.
Toby is the Co-Author of Narrative Generation, a groundbreaking book focusing on the significance of narrative in a world besieged by noise and transformation. The making of Narrative Generation was conceived via a 50 person co-collaboration process known as a “book swam”.
Before reformulating Spatial Shift in 2017, Toby joined his former client, SparkPR to establish the first ever “Chief Narrative Officer” role. He built his first narrative design process called “Agile Narrative” that launched 15 corporate narratives for companies ranging from stealth startups to recognizable public brands such as eHarmony and Walmart.
Prior to SparkPR, Toby engaged with a portfolio of clients to accelerate his fascination with design thinking and agile development for business outcomes. He partnered with Prohaska Consulting, a pioneer in programmatic consulting – developing programmatic strategies for such clients as eBay, Opera Mediaworks, Coupons.com, Radio Advertising Bureau, Summit Media, Time Warner Cable, BandsInTown and Legacy.com. He co-authored the RAB White Paper on Programmatic Radio and well as the Digital Out of Home White Paper on Programmatic DOOH.
He expanded his innovation expertise at THE FACTORY – an innovative immersion firm in SF. Toby worked as an immersion facilitator with Wells Fargo, Levis and Li & Fung to develop breakthrough business outcomes in a 48-hour period.
Toby’s Silicon Valley startup experience includes executive roles at AllAdvantage, Aha Radio (acquired by Harman Corporation), Everloop and Anchor Intelligence (acquired by Comscore). He is a co-founder in Drive Time Metrics (a connected car analytics company) and a partner in Kitchen Collective (a unique urban cooking club based in Napa). He also advises for several early stage startups in Artificial Intelligence, Virtual Reality and Next Gen content curation space.
Toby’s corporate background pioneered the era of selling integrated media assets to Global 500 companies. He led corporate sales and business development teams that sold over $1B in marketing programs at Gannett, Meredith, Time Warner and AOL over a 14 year period. He sold many “industry firsts” ranging from the first sponsor of the Heisman Trophy; the first Interactive Game - Goldrush - with Mark Burnett on AOL; the first live broadcast on AOL - Live Aid; the first globally integrated AOL TWX deal with Toyota - Music Goes Global. He also led an “industry first” in-vehicle interactive advertising effort while in the connected car space with Quiznos while at Aha Radio in 2013.
Toby’s digital experience goes back to the launch of Pathfinder at Time Inc. in 1994. His expertise extended into eCommerce, working with some of the biggest brands in America - ebay, Amazon, Nordstroms, Netflix, REI, Best Buy, among others.