Like the “becomers” on whom it focuses — née ABC Family — faced a tough decision about the next stage of its life.

Growing up as ABC Family, the channel had aired lots of owned and acquired programming that focused on the family. But as it started to expand its purview — with shows such as Pretty Little Liars, The Fosters, Young & Hungry and Baby Daddy — the team at ABC Family realized that they needed the channel’s brand to match the channel’s programming identity.

They wanted to launch more shows along the lines of Pretty Little Liars — shows such as the channel’s current line-up that includes Stitchers, Shadowhunters and Recovery Road — but they also wanted to continue offering fun family-friendly events such as the network’s popular “25 Days of Christmas” and “Freeform’s ‘Frozen’ Weekend,” which aired at the end of March. They wanted to create a brand that could support all of that and more.

“We wanted to recommit to the young audience and reach more of them,” says Nigel Cox-Hagan, senior vice president of marketing, creative and branding for Freeform. “We had been successful among women 18-34, but there are something like 89 million people [both men and women] within that age range in the U.S., and for all of our success we were reaching approximately one-third of them.

“We asked the question: what was the impediment to us reaching the other two-thirds of them? We did research and realized that one of the major impediments was that ‘family’ brand. They associated that name with things that weren’t about teens, young adults or people in their 20s.”

“The word ‘family’ was the disconnect,” says Stacy Asturias, Freeform vice president of creative.

To live as a cable network whose brand feels unrelated to its programming is not uncommon: TLC started as The Learning Channel and now generally airs docu-reality shows; A&E began as Arts & Entertainment, featuring opera and ballet, and now makes its living with a wide range of series such as scripted horror-tinged dramas Bates Motel and Damien and reality shows Duck Dynasty and Wahlburgers. So brand certainly isn’t everything.

But in the case of ABC Family, it was time to move on to the next thing, to fully embrace what it had already become, and that was a network that offered edgier programming to young adults.

“To our knowledge, no other cable channel has gone through a name change when they were in as strong of a position as we were. But a key part of our strategy with the rename was to reassure our audience that we understood them and are here to serve them,” says Asturias.

ABC Family announced the name change in late 2015, and then marketed it heavily over “25 Days of Christmas,” during which the channel gets close to 100 million views over the course of December.

RELATED: ABC Family Rebranding, Changing Name to Freeform

“The message on air and on social was ‘we’re going to have more of what you love and a new name in a new year,’” says Asturias.

Come January, the rebrand rolled out. And it encapsulated what the word Freeform means. The campaign felt like something in freeform, in creative but controlled chaos. It felt like what a millennial might experience when she first enters the adult world: her choices are hers but there are so many of them. Sometimes that’s beautiful, often that’s confusing, but usually it all falls into place.

To select the name Freeform, the team researched for more than a year, working with naming agency Lexicon to ultimately consider more than 3,000 names.

“We looked at each name and did heavy research to match it up to the brand attributes that we really valued,” says Karin Rainey, Freeform vice president, branding and design. “The name Freeform was the one that scored off the charts with the brand attributes,” and those are encapsulated in words such as “expressive,” “modern” and “risk-taking.”

“Changing ABC Family’s well-known name and brand also was intended to “future-proof ourselves … with a name that felt more modern and about a media world that’s multi-platform. We looked at Snapchat and YouTube and knew we had to live in that world as comfortably as we live in the linear world,” says Cox-Hagan.

With the name chosen, the team moved on to what the actual rebrand would look like, from the promotion to the logo, graphics packages, bumpers, interstitials — all of the pieces that weave a brand into the complete fabric of a channel. To a large extent, the marketing team looked forward to having a new look, having lived with a strict palette of persimmon, orange and white for many years.

“We worked with several agencies to develop this brand, which is a complete philosophy. We wanted it to be infinitely creative and versatile. With comedies, dramas and unscripted shows on our air, we needed a brand that was going to be very flexible, like the concept of Freeform,” says Rainey.

ABC Family already had been working closely with creative agency Loyalkaspar in the early stages of the rebrand, when it was just freshening up the existing brand and not yet entirely convinced it was going to switch to a new name.

The NYC and LA-based agency has been working with ABC Family on the evolution since fall 2014, when the network first established that its network’s audience was made up of “becomers,” or young adults experiencing their first firsts, such as first kiss, first relationship, first home of their own or first child.

“Knowing that they came from a place of rules, we wanted to liberate them,” says Daniel Dörnemann, executive creative director at Loyalkaspar. “The first step was a shift toward being more creative, more improvised, more imperfect. A lot of it was already in place. The new name was catching up with where the brand already was.”

“The really interesting and beautiful thing about the name Freeform is that it’s more than a name — it’s a promise, a philosophy. It wants to have rules, but it doesn’t want to have rules. It wants to be defined and yet it is constantly evolving,” says Dörnemann.

Loyalkaspar laid the ground work for the new brand, creating a guide, and Freeform then let it and other agencies take it away, creatively speaking.

While a look at much of Freeform’s new creative makes it seem like there are no rules, in a way it’s a clever trick.

“It’s a challenge because we want there to be a lot of flexibility and diversity in this brand, but there can’t be no rules,” says Rainey. “We have a philosophy that we are using: the federal brand is the brand that wraps the network, while the state brand wraps the series within it.”

Once the new name and the rebrand went live, the Freeform team took them both to social media and to fans on the ground.

The initial sizzle reel, shown across social media, was designed for Freeform by multiple agencies who took an “Exquisite Corpse” approach to the work. Each of them put their own creative stamp on the spots without knowing what the others were doing, and Freeform edited all of those looks together into one cohesive, ultra-creative whole.

Team Freeform also created a Google search campaign so that when people typed in certain questions into the Google search bar, custom-created videos would pop up.

“We really want to be collaborative with agencies as well as our own viewers,” says Rainey. ”Art is everywhere; style is everywhere. None of it is confined to a single platform.”

Just like Freeform and its viewers.

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