Founder / Technologist / Attorney - New York
Tom
Tom
Chernaik
He read a footnote in the Federal Trade Commission's 2009 endorsement guidelines and decided the sponsored post needed a grammar. Then he patented it.
He read a footnote in the Federal Trade Commission's 2009 endorsement guidelines and decided the sponsored post needed a grammar. Then he patented it.
Tom Chernaik runs a business whose entire premise is a formatting problem: how do you fit a legally required disclosure into a tweet?
The answer he built, and then patented, is CMP.LY - a system of short codes running from CMP.ly/0 through CMP.ly/5, each standing in for a specific relationship a poster might have with a brand. Paid. Sponsored. Free product received. Employee. Six options, machine-readable, human-clickable, small enough to survive inside 140 characters. It reads like a URL shortener. It behaves like a compliance officer.
CMP.LY later grew into CommandPost, a platform that monitored brand social channels and measured whether content strategy actually worked. In 2015, Gartner named it a Cool Vendor while it was still in beta, with more than thirty leading brands and agencies already using it. That same year the venture money vanished when the lead investor died. Chernaik fell back on the patents and kept the core disclosure product alive.
He is, by training, a lawyer. He describes himself first as a problem-solver and a technologist. The problems he keeps circling back to are the ones nobody else finds interesting until they suddenly matter to everyone: disclosure, transparency, identity, and who is telling the truth online.
Standardized codes as reported at launch. Each links to a full, documented disclosure.
Reputation is probably the most important reason to properly disclose. There is a growing sense of mistrust of digital and social content, and being transparent can go a long way to establishing yourself as credible. - Tom Chernaik, on why disclosure matters
Chernaik started in the music business, work he says he genuinely loved.
Arista Records. SonicNet, one of the early music services on the internet. He co-founded an independent label, Gotham Records, and launched AllIndie.com, a startup that let independent musicians handle promotion, marketing, and distribution without signing away their rights to a traditional label. When the rest of the industry was busy suing Napster, he partnered with it instead, looking for a way to make the disruption work for the artists he represented rather than against them. That instinct - work with the thing everyone else is fighting - is the quiet through-line of his whole career.
He built music sponsorships at Track Entertainment, including the Pepsi Britney Spears tour. He built advertising and sponsorship platforms for Fortune 100 brands at XM Satellite Radio, now part of Sirius XM. Somewhere in there he also picked up a JD from Yeshiva University's Cardozo School of Law, on top of a liberal arts degree from NYU. The lawyer and the marketer would eventually collide over a single regulatory update, and out of that collision came CMP.LY.
Arista and SonicNet, then co-founding Gotham Records and launching AllIndie.com for independent artists.
Business development at Track Entertainment - including the Pepsi Britney Spears tour - and ad platforms at XM Satellite Radio.
The FTC updates its endorsement rules. Chernaik founds CMP.LY to make compliance a product, not a paragraph.
Launches CMP.LY4Finance, taking on disclosure in the hardest, most heavily regulated industry to post in.
Gartner recognizes CommandPost while still in beta, with 30+ brands and agencies already aboard.
The lead investor dies and funding collapses. Chernaik keeps the core disclosure product and its patents alive.
I am passionate about using technology to address identified problems, especially complex challenges that require elegant solutions. - Tom Chernaik
Chernaik's bet was contrarian in 2009 and obvious now: disclosure is not a legal burden, it is a trust feature.
Regulators, he has argued as an expert witness and frequent speaker, are serious about advertising not being deceptive and about relationships between brands and their advocates being clearly disclosed. But the deeper argument he keeps making is about reputation. In an economy that now runs on influencers, the idea that transparency is a competitive advantage rather than a compliance tax has aged remarkably well.
He co-chaired the Members Ethics Advisory Panel at WOMMA, the Word of Mouth Marketing Association, helping write the norms for how marketers should behave online before that was a mainstream concern.
- Partners with disruption instead of litigating it
- Drawn to complex problems that want elegant answers
- Persistent - fell back to patents when the money died
- Lawyer's precision, marketer's instincts
- Ethically minded, publicly and on the record
A New Yorker who, by his own account, has lived in Manhattan his whole life.
Trained as a lawyer, but introduces himself first as a problem-solver and technologist.
His earliest startup, AllIndie.com, helped independent musicians market and distribute without a traditional label deal.
The company name is also its product - CMP.LY doubles as a compliance-flavored URL shortener.
His Twitter handle, @CMPLYtom, fuses the company and his first name into a single word.
Later interests orbit the same question he began with: blockchain, AI, and privacy applied to identity and trust.
We are committed to applying the technologies and lessons we've learned to solving challenges around disclosure, transparency and content strategy. - Tom Chernaik, on what comes next
Tom Chernaik is a New York entrepreneur and lawyer who turned a single 2009 FTC rule change into a business. As CEO and co-founder of CMP.LY (later CommandPost), he built a patented system for squeezing legally required advertising disclosures into character-limited social media posts, using short codes like CMP.ly/0 through CMP.ly/5. A former music-industry marketer with a JD from Cardozo, he raised over $4 million in venture capital, earned a 2015 Gartner Cool Vendor nod, and became a go-to voice on social media ethics as co-chair of WOMMA's ethics panel.
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