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Network: SOL Música
Creative: LUMBRE
Target Audience: Music lovers, 14-24
Campaign Led By: Sergio Saleh, Creative Director, LUMBRE; Pablo Encabo, Executive Producer, LUMBRE; Adriana Campos, Art Director, LUMBRE; Javier Jauregui, Art Director, LUMBRE; Design and Animation, LUMBRE: Federico Dams, Rodolfo Melian, Javier Jauregui, Leo Campasso, Israel Giampietro, Nacho Malter, Leo Campasso, Dario Becher, Javier Tedin, Matias Poggini
Objective: SOL Música is the only channel that specializes specifically in Spanish music. The channel has had a clear mission and lives in a very specific space on air, but never had a chance to “step back and create a planned, comprehensive branding in its years on the air,” according to LUMBRE’s creative director Sergio Saleh. “The channel’s commercial success from serving the Spanish music loving community required complete rebranding to bring it to the next level.”
Steps Taken: Buenos Aires-based design studio LUMBRE actually rebranded four channels for Spain’s Chello Multicanal this year. SOL Música is the first of these channels to roll out, and as the first (and only) channel dedicated to Spanish music, it had a clear message but no concise way to get it across to viewers.
According to LUMBRE’s Saleh, “As SOL Música covers almost the entire spectrum of musical styles, the branding should be equally diverse and inclusive.” Their previous look had been inspired by “surreal imagery and scenes from the streets.”
LUMBRE chose to turn that around and use traditional design aesthetics to give the channel a young, modern feel to better reflect their audience and to avoid following the mainstream look adopted by other music networks. LUMBRE wanted the channel to have a look and feel of its own, but that also imitates the diversity of its music and programming.
Going down this path with traditional animation, this meant that the team at LUMBRE created each piece for idents, promos and lower-thirds by hand-drawing them frame by frame. Namely, they created characters to represent each genre of music the programming represents. Two women and two men took center stage on some of the promos, the movement of each character representing a style of music: a Latina, a rock n’ roller, a techno kid and an indie girl.
“The music for a music channel is both extremely important and extremely tricky,” according to Saleh. “They need a much larger variety of IDs and promos to keep things interesting and avoid excessive repetition.” Understandably, picking out music and sound design for each promo or ident was a challenge. In the end, they worked with the channel to choose music that reflected Spanish music as a whole as well as the feel of the channel’s programming. The final look felt local and personal but had a vibe of international culture, using each character’s animation to reflect a different part of the atmosphere that is Spanish music.
Lessons Learned: “Rebranding four channels at the same time was something of a post-doctorate in broadcast project management,” said LUMBRE’s executive producer Pablo Encabo. “And we learned more about Spanish music than we thought was possible.”
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