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NBC Universal International Television’s 2013 rebranding of its global Universal Channel to create a uniform look and feel across its 11 global territories resulted in 9 percent growth in overall viewing worldwide and a 23-spot jump in channel rankings, said the cable network’s international creative VP on Tuesday.
Marco Giusti told the 2014 PromaxBDA Europe Conference in London that those results prove to executives that creative and marketing teams are vital to a network’s business success in a television business that’s seeing rapidly increasing competition from new players.
“It puts creative and what creatives do firmly on the radar as a ‘need to have,‘” Giusti said. “What we do shouldn’t be an after thought.
NBCU International wanted to create a globally-consistent brand that could still be locally relevant across those 11 territories, and that gave viewers an immediate awareness of what defined the Universal Channel brand—something that had been clearly lacking as the network developed in different stages in different markets.
Working with Lee Hunt and stakeholders from 19 countries, Universal landed on new positioning that focused on being “all about characters.”
“It seems pretty obvious now, but at the time not a lot of people were taking that stance,” said Giusti.
Universal tapped Red Bee Media to help forge a new on-air look and tagline that reflected the focus on fully-rounded, multi-layered characters in each show.
The result: “100% Characters,” a tagline that would be translated in every market, and precede the Universal Channel branding in everything the network does.
But there was one more hurdle before they could start rolling out new on-air and offline promos and marketing assets.
“It became very obvious at this point that we needed a new logo,” Giusti said. “It clearly wasn’t going to be what we wanted without a new logo.”
Out went the legacy globe that highlighted Universal’s history and longstanding look.
In came a streamlined circular logo that evoked that globe, while presenting a fresher, more modern look.
A slight little chip at the bottom of the logo lent a bit of balance, and also allowed them to develop one of the signature themes of the new branding: the idea of a character dial, which highlights in percentages the different traits that add up to 100 percent to make the featured characters in Universal’s shows, such as “House,” “Bates Motel,” and “Sleepy Hollow.”
“Sleepy Hollow”‘s leading man is “30% Legend” and “70% Leader,” for example.
Universal’s positioning spot (below) and design reel (above) highlight how all of the different creative elements—OSP’s, on-air promos and idents— come together and play off each other on screen.
The biggest takeaway from the rebrand for Giusti? “Communicate. Communicate. Communicate.”
“You will fall out—with your people, with your agency, with your client,” Giusti said. “Kiss and make up. You should always remember why you fell in love in the first place.”
(Video: Dan Aldridge/Vimeo)
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