ITV’s rebrand has now gone live, with a broader range of idents to position the broadcaster at the “heart of popular culture”. However, John Oswald at service design consultancy Fjord argues ITV still need to align their online video player to the TV content.
ITV this week have launched a major rebrand, with all their idents, logos and colours undergoing a fundamental new treatment. Clearly from a visual perspective there’s been a thorough rethink and at least on the surface it’s an impressive job. And it’s certainly going to make a splash. But there are some bigger things that ITV needs to fix, in our opinion.
For one, the player brand and the shows don’t play together nicely – from a usability point of view, people just want to watch the shows – it’s not logical to have to engage with a separate ‘player’ brand, especially now that the BBC have successfully educated the British population on catch-up. The external brand continues to project the internal divisions between player, news and general show information, which is a huge missed opportunity.
The brand can also appear a little insipid alongside all of the ITV shows – clearly there’s a desire to let the shows take the stage more than the brand, and that certainly reflects how people perceive it.
The rebrand doesn’t really surface any values about what makes ITV a broadcasting company, a content creator, a content aggregator, and what makes it a historic British brand. It’s at risk, we feel, of becoming too superficial and getting overtaken by the continuing wave of internet-enabled media innovation.”
By John Oswald
Business Design Lead
Fjord
www.fjordnet.com
