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Too much choice
Television
these days is an industry that is always seeking your attention. They want you
to watch their programmes and remember their channel. They want you to
identify with their channel brand, just like you identify with other brands.
TV channels are always looking to promote their brand and keep you on their
channel.
But the
methods they use to promote the brand and to try and keep you on the channel
vary in effectiveness, dependent on many factors. Some are very effective and
serve a channel very well, such as the small menus on the Channel 4 idents.
Others are less effective, and some even backfire on TV channels, creating an
image the channel is not seeking to portray.
End
Credit Promotions (ECPs)
The idea of
an End Credit Promotion is relatively simple. Run the credits on one side of
the screen, whilst on the other side of the screen, a promo is shown for the
next programme on screen, or a particular programme that is being heavily
trailed for that night.
The idea is
a visual version of the kind of announcements that are done over the end
credits of programmes, and have been done for years. The idea of End Credit
Promotions is simply the next logical step along the line. Surely this little
change would get quietly accepted with a minimum of fuss.
Not quite.
ECPs were resounding criticised as being desperate attempts to keep viewers on
their channel and also for spoiling the mood of the programme, and not
allowing viewers the necessary downtime to get back to reality.
But in this
broadcasting environment, TV channels don't want viewers to get back to
reality, but to stay with them. That's more difficult for commercial channels,
when you have commercials and programme trailers between the programmes. That
is why ITV started using ECPs.
Are there
better methods? Some US TV stations have taken to ending one TV show and going
almost straight into the next with only a 5-second ident in between. All the
ads are played out during commercial breaks within the programmes. The UKTV
network of channels have been known to do something similar over here with 60
seconds worth of trailers before going into an ident and continuity
announcement. Is it better than ECPs? Well, certainly it does seem less
controversial.
Channel
Identifiers/DOGs
This is one
item of branding that has caused a lot of heated debate over the years. I have
never known anything in the arena of presentation and channel branding
generate so much friction. Yet, the roots of the logo in the corner are
believed to be far less controversial than the subject itself has become.
It is
believed that in the late 1970's in Italy, pirate stations were
re-transmitting programmes from various legal broadcasters in the country and
claiming them as their own. To combat this situation, the legal broadcasters,
such as RAI, started putting their channel name in one of the corners.
In those
early days, digital graphics were very primitive, blocky and looked digital.
The only thing branding related about those original graphics was the channel
name. There was no real design element to those graphics, and certainly very
little branding related.
These days,
there are very few channels that don't use some kind of channel identifier and
all of them are designed to match the look of the channel they are on. Some
are quite small, discreet and almost unnoticeable, whilst other are big,
blocky, full colour and animated, designed purely to catch the eye.
Why do they
cause so much friction? Well, they are a fairly recent innovation, having been
refined in the USA since their Italian creation. They are on screen fairly
permanently, with only adverts being marked out as an exception for their
continual appearance.
To some
people, it is seen as an insult to their intelligence. They know what they are
watching; they do not need a constant reminder of it on their screens.
Especially not when you have Electronic Programme Guides which, at the touch
of a button, can tell what channel and programme you are watching, and what
follows next.
No one is
truly sure whether any real research has been done on the effectiveness of
these channel identifiers. Certainly I have not seen any evidence published on
this. Are there far better methods out there? Yes, but most of them are
long-term branding strategies rather than single items of branding.
There are,
incredibly, a few people who are known to truly like DOGs, whilst most just
seem to put up with them. But a lot of people do not like them at all. Their
job is to re-enforce the channel brand, but all they really seem to do is
anger people.
There are
other incidents of presentation backfiring on broadcasters, such as one news
channel who managed to change their serious image for a tabloid one, which
along with a change of programming has spectacularly backfired on the channel.
Then there
was the sports news channel, which changed its name to sound more like a dot
com. Unfortunately this happened just before the dot com boom went bust. After
around 18 months, the channel had to abandon the dot com rebrand, and went
back to their original channel name.
With there
being more and more channels launching on a regular basis, mistakes in
branding could prove to be more and more disastrous, as around 300 channels
fight for a maximum of 60 million viewers. That is an unsustainable high
number of channels. It doesn't take a genius to figure out that an average of
200,000 viewers per channel is not sustainable or profitable.
It would
seem that maybe 100 channels might be a sustainable number, giving an average
of 600,000 per channel. Certainly 60 channels seems sustainable. The lowest
number of channels we could see in the future is around 12, while the highest
sustainable number definitely won't to exceed 100. With the odds stacked
against the broadcasters when it comes to survival, branding mistakes are
never an option.
Ian Beaumont
Webmaster
of Ident City and
proprietor of City Media Productions.
Compilation ©
2002 Transdiffusion Broadcasting System
Text © 2002 Ian Beaumont. All rights reserved. Used with permission.
Views expressed in this article are not necessarily those of the
Transdiffusion Broadcasting System in general.
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