A double-decker bus is an extravagant answer to a fairly small object: a bottle of beauty product. For Cole Chasen Trider, whose agency helped put BYOMA on a bus at The Grove in Los Angeles, the scale makes a certain sense. A product sits on a shelf. A bus gives people somewhere to go, something to photograph and a reason to talk. The bottle suddenly has a social life.
Trider founded Chasen Creative Media in 2016. His work occupies the space where a publicist’s contact book meets a creator’s audience and an event producer’s floor plan. The results have included a sunless-tanning pop-up during a snowstorm, a television anniversary that fans could walk into, and a fragrance launch dressed for tea. There is considerable planning behind the apparent frivolity. Someone has to make the invitation worth accepting.
That is the useful way into his story. Trider came through luxury fashion publicity, built experience at another agency and then established a business around the growing overlap between traditional media and social platforms. His career traces a change in who gets to introduce a brand to the world. An editor might still make the introduction. So might a creator. Sometimes, apparently, a bus can help.
The contact book came first
Before Chasen Creative Media, there was the University of Southern California. Trider attended from 2007 to 2010, studying communication with a minor in business administration. His LinkedIn profile also lists involvement with undergraduate student government’s Community Affairs Board. Communication and business were a practical pairing for a career that would eventually require him to understand both an audience and the company hoping to reach it.
His early work included LA Models, entertainment marketing at Bulgari and freelance celebrity relations at Chanel. These were different points along the route between talent, luxury brands and public attention. He later worked as an account coordinator at laChambre Public Relations. The sequence puts the day-to-day machinery of representation before the founder title: working around people and brands whose visibility was part of their business.
At Autumn Communications, he moved into agency leadership. A contemporary trade announcement recorded his promotion from senior account executive to senior account manager; he subsequently became vice president. His work there included building the New York division, with an account roster spanning beauty, entertainment, technology and luxury. It was an education in how far a publicity practice could travel beyond a single category.
A business for the people with an audience
By the time Trider started his own firm, social personalities were becoming businesses with needs extending well beyond the next post. A creator could attract an audience and still need a clear commercial identity. An established beauty brand could have devoted customers and still need a way to be heard in a crowded conversation. Those two problems gave his agency a place to work.
In April 2020, he returned to USC Annenberg for an online career event. The program covered personal branding, networking and creating employment opportunities. His introduction described a founder helping popular influencers and bloggers develop profitable brands while giving cult-favorite companies a more defined voice. Four years after starting CCM, he was explaining a career built around making attention useful.
There is a revealing symmetry in that appearance. The subjects offered to students resembled the questions his clients faced: What do you stand for? Who needs to understand it? How do you make the connection? A graduate seeking a first job and a creator developing a business operate at different scales, but both need other people to grasp what they can offer. Trider’s work brings those questions into commercial practice.
“PR + SOCIAL + EXPERIENTIAL”
Chasen Creative Media’s service proposition
The agency’s own shorthand has three parts. Media outreach supplies the editorial relationships. Influencer work includes paid partnerships, product seeding, mailers and collaborations. Events give those relationships a setting. For a founder, keeping those activities under one roof means the initial idea can be considered alongside the invitation list, the coverage and the material that people will share afterward.
Summer, with a chance of snow
The Isle of Paradise activation offers a pleasingly literal example. CCM helped bring a sunless-tanning experience to SoHo in the middle of a snowstorm. New York supplied winter; the brand supplied an alternative mood. A weather forecast would hardly have suggested the occasion. The contrast gave the event a character that a straightforward product description would have struggled to match.
The BYOMA double-decker activation at The Grove took another route, turning a familiar urban object into a consumer encounter. Together, the two projects show the kind of work Trider’s firm had developed by its 2023 Next Gen recognition. The brands belonged to the digital conversation, but the invitations had physical addresses. A person could step away from a screen and meet the product in a setting made for it.
For Trider’s business, the connection matters more than the prop. A bus or a pop-up is an expense with a purpose: it gives a brand’s audience an occasion to participate. The entertaining part earns attention; the planning determines whose attention arrives. Read this way, the agency’s events are practical expressions of the founding idea, joining the people who make a product with the people who help explain it.
A launch has a guest list
At Faena Miami Beach, Trider appeared alongside Shania Donaldson at a brunch celebrating John Legend’s LOVED01. Legend hosted the occasion with Faena Group founder Alan Faena; the gathering brought together the brand’s leadership, creators and other guests. The photograph catches Trider inside the sort of gathering his business works around: a brand introduction conducted through people, conversation and a carefully chosen place.
CCM’s work on LOVED01 extended beyond the gathering. The launch combined press activity and collaborations involving Jackie Aina and Patrick Starr, while the brand received an Allure Best of Beauty Award in its first year. The distinction belongs to the brand. The publicity work shows the agency’s role around it, connecting a new name with people who already had audiences of their own.
Trider’s professional circle consequently spans several kinds of founder. Aina is both a creator and a business owner. Legend brings an entertainment career to a consumer brand. A communications agency working in that territory has to understand the existing public identity while introducing something new. Celebrity supplies recognition; the launch still needs a reason for people to care about the product itself.
When the audience can walk into the show
Entertainment offered CCM another way to work with an audience that already cared. For the 25th anniversary of Sex and the City and the second season of And Just Like That…, the agency partnered with HBO Max on a free, four-day immersive fan experience. Media, influencers and fans were invited into an occasion built around the series’ history.
The premise had an advantage a new product rarely enjoys: people arrived with memories. The job was to give those memories a place to land. Later, CCM’s work included the Hot Fellas Bakery pop-up associated with And Just Like That…. A fictional world acquired a real-world destination. Television had already supplied the affection; an activation supplied a new way to spend time with it.
Other partnerships connected beauty with established cultural identities. CCM’s Paul Mitchell work included a partnership with Mattel’s World of Barbie in Santa Monica. Its Tan-Luxe work included a collaboration with Paris Hilton. These are distinct commercial projects, yet they share a useful question: which association will feel legible to the audience before anyone begins explaining the campaign?
The conversation after the launch
As the work broadened, so did the agency’s footprint. CCM opened a New York City division in 2023, adding an eastern base to its Los Angeles presence. Its 2024 and 2025 PR Net 100 recognition placed Trider alongside the firm’s leadership team. For someone who had previously helped build another agency’s New York operation, the expansion marked a return to familiar professional geography with his own company.
By 2025, the projects included Shakira’s haircare brand isima, with concert activations and influencer mailers, and a New York tea-party launch for KAYALI’s Fleur Majesty Rose Royale fragrance. A concert and a tea party ask for rather different shoes. They also give a communications team different ways to stage an introduction: one borrows the energy of a performance, the other creates an occasion around scent and ceremony.
That October, Trider was listed on Advertising Week New York’s panel about Gen Z, Gen Alpha and brand loyalty, alongside BYOMA founder Marc Elrick, FORVR MOOD co-founder Jackie Aina and Mane CEO Rachel Jonas Gilman. The scheduled discussion concerned how brands reach younger shoppers and keep their loyalty. The company he kept on the lineup made his position clear: a communications founder in conversation with the businesses building those relationships.
His career has moved from representing luxury names to helping organize the encounters around a much wider collection of brands. The central task remains recognizably human. Someone has made something and wants somebody else to notice. Trider has built a company around arranging the introduction, whether the meeting happens in an editor’s inbox, on a creator’s feed or upstairs on a double-decker bus.