Who is Sarah Chamberlain?

Sarah Chamberlain is a Creative Director based in Durham, NC with 11 years of experience at Frequence/MadHive, an adtech company acquired by Goldman Sachs for $300M. She led brand identity, product design systems, and grew a creative team from 4 freelancers to 40 people.

What did Sarah Chamberlain do at MadHive?

As Creative Director at MadHive (formerly Frequence) for 11 years, Sarah simultaneously built a brand identity system, a product design system for advertising software, and an internal creative agency producing 20,000+ ads per quarter. She grew the creative team from 4 freelancers to 40 full-time staff through the company's $300M Goldman Sachs acquisition.

What is Sarah Chamberlain's background?

Sarah Chamberlain holds a BFA from the Corcoran College of Art and Design. She has 15+ years of experience in creative direction across adtech, B2B SaaS, e-commerce, enterprise brand, and political campaigns. She was the first female executive at Frequence and currently operates Porch Light Studio, an AI-integrated design practice.

My Journey with frequence → Madhive

Brought On as Creative Director. Built everything else.

In 2015, I joined Frequence as Creative Director — a startup ad-tech platform looking for someone to lead a small team of freelance banner designers, establish creative standards, and help shape the product's visual direction. What I found was a company with enormous potential and no creative infrastructure: no brand system, no design language for the platform, and no roadmap for scaling a creative team.

I became the first woman on the executive leadership team and worked directly with CEO Tom Cheli and the founding partners to build three things simultaneously — a brand identity that could stand next to the biggest media companies in the country, a product design system that made complex advertising software feel intuitive, and an internal creative agency that could produce at scale without sacrificing quality. Over eleven years, I grew the team from 4 freelancers to a global department of 40, helped scale the company from 25 employees to over 300, and built the creative frameworks that carried Frequence through its acquisition by Goldman Sachs-backed Madhive.

01 — Brand & Identity

Three Evolutions of a Brand That grew up with the company

When I arrived, Frequence's brand was startup-raw — Bebas Neue headlines, a bold orange palette, and the energy of a team that was moving too fast to worry about polish. That worked at 25 people. It wasn't going to work when we were pitching Nexstar and Hearst.

I led the brand through three major evolutions — refining the color palette for credibility with enterprise media companies, commissioning a custom typeface that gave us a distinctive voice without sacrificing legibility, and developing multiple generations of iconography and taglines as the product and positioning matured. Each iteration reflected where the company was headed, not just where it had been.

The work extended well beyond logo and guidelines. I designed three iterations of the marketing website, created content for our annual LASI reports and Omnichannel guides, established our trade show presence and conference identity, and built out a social media design system that kept the brand consistent across every touchpoint.

Brand Strategy Visual Identity Custom Typography Content Design Trade Shows Social Media

02 — Product Design

From proposal to launch— One Platform, Zero Confusion

Frequence's platform covers the full lifecycle of an advertising campaign. Proposals, insertion orders, creative production, campaign editing, launch into the DSPs. A lot of moving parts, and our job was to make them feel like one.

I designed the proposal builder, a custom tool that pulls real-time demographic, geographic and interest data so sales teams can put together polished, client-ready proposals in minutes. I built the Frequence Ad Builder for creative production, and later the AI-powered SEM tool that generates SEM campaigns across industries. I also contributed to the platform's UI migration from Material Design to a customized Tailwind CSS system that could actually grow with the product.

The question behind every design decision was simple: does this make someone's day easier? If a sales rep can build a proposal in five minutes instead of one week, that's good design. If a designer can produce an ad in one click instead of twelve, that's good design. Clear beats clever, every time.

SaaS Design Systems Proposal Software Ad Builder AI Workflow Tools UI/UX

Proposal builder — recommended products and spend

Proposal builder — demographics targeting

03 — Creative Team & Production

Forty People, Every Omnichannel Format, one shared standard

When I started, the creative team was four freelance banner ad designers. Hourly, no PTO, no leadership, no path for growth. Today it's a global team of ~40: designers, copywriters, motion artists, audio techs, front-end developers, and production associates. We produce about 20,000 ads per quarter across display, video, CTV, audio, social, SEM, email, landing pages, and native.

I built this team by hiring for character over pedigree, offering real ownership, culture, training and opportunity over big corporate salaries, and by building systems that let the work scale without grinding people down. That included BEAM-D, a feedback framework that gives a shared language for evaluating creative work, and an evolution of our production workflow from manual, multi-file Photoshop and Animate to artboards, smart objects, and automated HTML tools built into the platform.

We've maintained one of the lowest attrition rates in the company, even through an acquisition and multiple rounds of restructuring. I think the reason is simple: every person on this team knows what they're good at, and they know I'll fight to let them do it.

Team Building Creative Direction Process Design BEAM-D Framework Display Video Audio SEM