Brands that can’t pass the Twitter test aren’t strong enough to stand up in today’s competitive TV marketplace, according to WE tv President and General Manager Marc Juris.

“if you can’t communicate it in 140 characters or less, it’s not a brand, it’s a bunch of B.S.,” Juris told the Variety TV Summit in Los Angeles on Wednesday. “Plenty of rebrands are a total waste of time and money with nothing addressing the real problems of your company.”

Juris knows a thing or two about rebrands: he’s made a career out of transforming cable networks, including overseeing the transition of AMC to an ad-supported channel, and the shift from Court TV to truTV. He’s currently overseeing WE tv’s evolution into a less female-centric outlet.

The first step, he said, is to start with a name.

Audiences make a decision fast, with very little thought and very little attention, Juris said. A network name has to do the heavy lifting.

“Names should not be an after thought,” he said.

As Juris and his team wrestled with their own future at WEtv they realized that too many viewers still thought of the network as “Women’s Entertainment,” and that alienated 150 million potential viewers.

“We have a great name. We just needed to redefine it,” Juris said.

After five different branding companies, six different broadcast design firms, and countless brand briefs, his team felt like they hadn’t seen anything special.

“Everything we got was just okay, nothing special. We felt like we had seen it all before,” he said.

So they headed south to Buenos Aires, and found a match in Buenos Aires-based Eloisa Iturbe Studio.

As Brief reported earlier this summer, the result is a rebranded WE that “encompass[es] an audience that is not only more socially connected, but more male. The redesign reflects that, putting the ‘WE’ from WE tv in words that the channel wants to define itself as, including ‘powerful’ and ‘awesome.’”

He also cautioned Wednesday against the temptation for a struggling network to make a clean break with the past.

“You don’t throw away an audience; You will fail,” Juris said. “You have to take your current audience and push them. Slowly swap them out. You have to be patient.”

Know what your viewers expect of the brand and be passionate about it, he advised.

“A lot of people can tell you what’s wrong it it. You have to take the aggregate and move forward with it.”

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