Comedy Central Brand Transformation
Laugh, and the world laughs with you.
(Weep, and you’re watching the wrong network).
Our Comedy Central brand transformation is unleashed online and on air.
Comedy Central came to thelab with two specific insights. First, they had popular programs but weren’t getting credit for them. And second, they weren’t reaching as young an audience as they wanted. We had two additional insights of our own: comedy is inherently social, and Comedy Central’s content needed to travel across platforms in a branded way.
On a very basic branding level, the challenges revolved around an issue of scale and transportability of the brand. The logo and branding needed to address this. And since a network is a brand that houses other brands—shows, content, personalities—we needed to create a system within a system that celebrated the rich content (the programming) without abandoning the people who bring it to you (the network).
For the exercise to be successful, we realized we needed to go beyond on-air branding and come up with a solution that would help Comedy Central enable viewers to know when they are in the presence of Comedy Central—on any and every platform—and to help them share content without losing sight of the fact that Comedy Central was behind it.
The web, like comedy, is inherently social, so we started from a digital perspective, moving them from behaving like a television brand to a media brand. This led to the idea of creating a new logo to “tag” content. We recommended that Comedy Central sanction funny content, not seek to be funny.
Because the copyright symbol is the ultimate emblem of the corporate world, we saw this as Comedy Central literally turning that notion on its head. Though it is subtle in its humor, we felt this logo brands Comedy Central as funny without having to paint them as wacky. The network has grown up a lot over the years and we see this logo as a sort of empty container that can take on any form the comedy requires.
The era of station identifications and television network logos is behind us. This is the era of networks identifying with a set of curated content, content that will appear on a variety of devices, from televisions to mobile phones. We created an identifier that can be flexible in this new media landscape, and can travel across all platforms seamlessly.
