As A&E has made the push into running only original programming during primetime, its branding has naturally followed suit. A new tagline announced last October, “Be Original,” served as a literal proclamation of the new outlook while also reflecting “the unique diversity of content of A&E,” said Guy Slattery, EVP of marketing at A&E Network.

But the phrase was merely the bow on the elaborate new promo package to come, a massive cumulative effort set forth by Slattery’s team at A&E, creative agency Troika, and the sound maestros at Man Made Music. Their cumulative creative power produced “cleaner, poppier, more energetic graphics, and sonic branding that draws people in and elicits emotion,” continued Slattery. “We wanted to let viewers know they are in an A&E environment on any platform.”

Among its many useful meanings, the versatile “Be Original” tagline also serves as a reference to A&E’s unbridled creativity. No longer a source of simply “Real. Life. Drama.,” A&E has evolved into a groundbreaking smorgasbord of entertainments, ranging from the record-setting reality show/sitcom “Duck Dynasty” to the oddball darkness of “Bates Motel,” to the hybrid western/modern crime thriller “Longmire.”

To unite these disparate elements, Troika’s new graphical scheme “needed to amplify the stories we tell,” said Slattery. Toward that purpose, sliding, cutting and text flipping effects characterize animations with energy and personality, while bold colors and logos support a clean information system that utilizes three custom-fitted typographies.

Rather than fix something that wasn’t broken, Troika began creating its graphic elements by mining “the great show marketing work that the A&E team had already done,” said Thompson, “which did create these very distinctive worlds. Each show has its own unique palette and textures.” Rather than try to recreate those distinctive features, Troika went straight to the sources, literally. Like a “merry band of bandits,” Thompson explained, the Troika team spent five weeks traveling around the country in order to physically visit the locations of four of A&E’s biggest shows: “Duck Dynasty” in Louisiana, “Bates Motel” in Vancouver, “Longmire” in Los Angeles, and the upcoming “Those Who Kill” in Pittsburgh.

At each locale, Troika worked closely with A&E to pull and shoot objects and textures from the actual set, thereby “capturing [the given show’s] spirit in its respective environment,” said Thompson. In addition to giving an organic, authentic feel to all elements of the promo packaging, the resulting high-res images of things, people and places could be incorporated into a brand platform built around the concept of assigning each show its own uniquely flavored “recipe card,” which A&E will be able to continually reference down the line.


As the graphics were coming together, so too was the sonic branding from Man Made Music. Lead by founder Joel Beckerman, the company’s main challenge was creating an anthem powerful enough to tie everything together but malleable enough to be broken off into smaller themed bits supporting shows ranging in tone from goofily comedic to rather horrific. Additionally, Beckerman felt that the wording of the network’s new tagline posed a special challenge in its own right, necessitating the “need to come up with something that really feels original, feels different than anything else out there in the television space,” he said. “But it also needed to be something that was approachable… to work across different genres of programming.”

Man Made solved those problems with an anthem Beckerman described as “a ‘Road House’ type rock [song] but with very unexpected instrumentation and colors. It’s not like a typical rock anthem. It has all sorts of organic playing in it. There are a lot of imperfections in it with the guitar playing and the drumming. It has a unique flavor.” Like the textures and objects on display in Troika’s graphics, the anthem taps into its core sense of originality by presenting something that feels real, raw and warmly alive.

“It’s the opposite of something that would be synthetic or mechanized,” Beckerman said. “Electronic textures [and] a mix of the live drumming and electronic drumming give it a quirky personality.”

All of the promotional elements from Troika and Man Made were subject to a rigorous testing “of the ‘brand puzzle’ against nearly all of our shows,” said Slattery. “If an element felt limiting, if it worked for high-energy shows, but not moodier ones for example, we overhauled it or got rid of it. What’s left is a system that can go from light to dark, fun to dramatic, big and cinematic to quiet and intimate.”

“It was quite an effort and A&E put a lot behind it,” Thompson added. “And we’ve been very happy to see that it does cut through and feels different and original and that people are connecting with the distinctiveness.”

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