ACOB S3E7 PBS
SPEAKERS
Blake Howard
Bogdan Geana
Tracy Clark
Bogdan Geana
00:00
I would say by far the greatest challenge for us was developing a strong but flexible brand architecture solution for such a complex system of local member stations, many of which had their own distinct identities, and had frankly been reluctant to adopt the broader PBS brand. The PBS ecosystem really lacked this consistency and wasn't taking full advantage of the collective power of its brand. This logo freedom approach made it seem like PBS just had so many different brands. Compounding that was just the broader visual inconsistency across patients and content verticals and channels and b2b etcetera we made sure to build enough flexibility in our recommendation to meet their unique needs.
Blake Howard 00:58
Hey, everyone, welcome to a Change of Brand, the show featuring behind the scenes stories of rebrand glory, drama or disaster. I'm your host, Blake Howard. For today's story, we are tuning into a brand that is classic Americana.
Voiceover
01:16
Tonight, is what you make it so make it for something special on your public TV station Playhouse in New York.
Blake Howard
01:28
I'm a child of the 80s and as such, I spent many hours of my childhood sitting around our living room watching our wood paneled blown TV in the house. You know, the TVs where the analog dial clunked as you change channels, and many of the shows I watched in that living room formed my worldview in more ways than I probably even know. In fact, one might say this was the theme song of my youth:
Audio music clip:
“Butterfly in the sky, I can go too, it's a reading rainbow to know and ways to grow a reading rainbow.”
Blake Howard
Hey, and pro tip if you want to crush it at a karaoke bar filled with kids from the 80s you just sing that Reading Rainbow theme song LeVar Burton practically raised me and opened up my mind to how sliced cheese factories work, how TV shows are made and even gave me nightmares about Rumpelstiltskin. Reading Rainbow was just one hit from PBS there was also Mr. Rogers, Sesame Street, Downton Abbey and many others that have had tremendous influence in American society, which is the point and the power of public media. It's supposed to be unbiased, unmotivated content that is free of control from the government, or of profit. It's kind of a big deal for democracy. In 2019, PBS, the poster child for public media in the United States launched a comprehensive refresh of its brand identity. And it's not a simple organization, with 330 plus, local affiliates, the brand agency and the PBS team we're going to have their hands full trying to get those member stations on board. For more backstory on PBS and what led up to this change of brand. Let's go to brand strategist Tracy Clark for our briefing.
Mr. Rogers Theme Song:
03:54
It's a beautiful day in this neighborhood. A beautiful day for a neighbor. Would you be mine? Could you be mine?
Tracy Clark
04:03
Boasting stations in all 50 states, the US Virgin Islands, American Samoa, Guam and Puerto Rico. PBS is truly the nation's network with programming ranging from children's shows to hard hitting news, historical costume dramas, to thought provoking documentaries. PBS has a little something for practically everyone.
Their story unfolds in 1967 when President Lyndon B Johnson signed the Public Broadcasting Act into legislation. The Act mandated the creation of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, a private taxpayer funded nonprofit organization that would disperse grants to public television and radio broadcasters across the country. The intent was to provide quality educational arts and cultural entertainment to Americans in what LBJ called an endeavor to enrich man spirits.
LBJ Speech excerpt:
04:57
While we work every day to produce new goods and to create new wealth, we want most of all to enrich man spirit. And that is the purpose of this act. So today, we rededicate if part of the airwaves which belong to all the people, and we dedicate them for the enlightenment of all the people.
Tracy Clark
05:32
Prior to PBS hitting the airwaves in October 1970, most Americans were already familiar with educational programming thanks to the National Educational Television, which debuted in 1952. NET served as a programming distribution and exchange service for local television stations but would eventually get into producing content directly. Most of the TV shows were targeted to adults and didn't really take entertainment into consideration. In fact, the deep intellectual dives earned the network the nickname UNIVERSITY OF THE AIR. PBS programming was and continues to be produced by individual member stations and third-party production companies. Some programs that began on NET continued on at PBS, including Sesame Street, Mr. Rogers Neighborhood and Washington Week, and there were new additions like Masterpiece Theater and Nova that brought a whole new energy into the mix. Fast forward to 1969 when newly elected President Richard Nixon wanted to cut proposed PBS funding in half, which would be from 20 million to $10 million dollars. In a plea to maintain full funding. Fred Rogers, the beloved creator and host of Mr. Rogers Neighborhood, testified before the Senate subcommittee on communications to defend the station's need for federal support.
Fred Rogers
07:00
I'm constantly concerned about what our children are seeing. And for 15 years, I have tried in this country and Canada to present what I feel is a meaningful expression of care. Do you marry I'm the house. Yes. And I do all the puppets and I write all the music and I write all the scripts.
Senator
07:24
I'm supposed to be a pretty tough guy. And this the first time I've had goose bumps for the last two days, I think it's wonderful. Looks like you just earned the $20 million.
Tracy Clark
07:46
Safe to say that his speech worked and the full 20 million was granted, a true testament to the powerful connection PBS and its content was capable of. In 1971, PBS introduced its now familiar logo to the public. Commonly known as the P head, the multicolored word Mark use the P and PBS to silhouette a human face and profile. The logo designed by Ernie Smith and Herb Lubalin was intended to represent the everyman and would be the basis of all future PBS logos for the next five decades. In 1984, Tom Geismar directed a logo redesign that singled out the P-head as a symbol. It was turned, cloned, and with a little cosmetic surgery, the new symbol coined the everyone symbol was born. Today there are more than 330 PBS member stations, and the network claims over 132 million viewers online or over broadcast. Its children's programming has become an entity of its own. And some more recent shows like Downton Abbey have catapulted PBS into the cultural mainstream. A few years back in 2018 and early 2019, PBS was starting to feel the pressures of the digital era and really wanting to celebrate their 50th anniversary in a big way. To prevent us from changing the channel PBS needed to change a brand.
Blake Howard
09:23
PBS partnered with Lippincott a design consultancy to embark on their evolutionary journey. You might remember them from season two when we discuss Starbucks and Southwest. The iconic everyman PBS symbol was tweaked in 2009 by Chermayeff Geismar and Haviv. The same firm that did the 1984 design, and this time it got all glossed up with sheen and shine. 10 years later, however, in 2019, it started to feel a bit dated. The update we're going to discuss today included some tweaks to the logo, where they slightly rounded noses of the profiles, rescaled the PBS text for readability and modernized the type. One of the more significant changes was transitioning from a primarily black brand to a blue one. The new signature PBS blue is used pretty heavily throughout the entire look and feel. Lippincott also worked with Monotype to create a custom PBS Sans font family that would work well across all of their applications, including broadcast and streaming platforms. Be sure to see the change of brand for yourself at a change of brand.com. Leading the design effort for this project was Bogdan Geana. He's a design partner with Lippincott where he's worked for the last 16 years. He's contributed to many rebrands that you have probably seen Starbucks, Walmart, eBay, Southwest, LG and even the NFL. Around 2017. Connie Birdsall, the Executive Creative Director at Lippincott mentioned above had the opportunity to work with PBS on a refresh. Apparently, the PBS CMO Ira Rubinstein was impressed with the work they had done on the Starbucks refresh and was interested in working together. So, they ironed out some details and were awarded the project. As noted in the intro, PBS is a uniquely iconic American brand. Many of us have fond memories of PBS shows from our childhood, and the brand has a special place in our hearts. But Bogdan didn't share in that nostalgia.
Bogdan Geana
11:35
I also learned that for many of my colleagues, PBS had such a special place in their heart, and they were able to share many fond memories. For me having spent my childhood in Romania I didn't personally grow up with PBS. But I clearly recall this show and national TV in the 80s and 90s. It was called Talking Encyclopedia, where once a week for an hour, they would present a range of 10-to-15-minute segments on just about everything from wildlife to science and technology, space travel, history and so on. And it was really insightful, it was educational, and it was fun without trying too hard to overhype, or to entertain, it's probably for me, the only show I still really vividly remember. So, I also understood the importance of continuing to produce and promote this type of work. And I was eager to be a part of this team.
Blake Howard 12:33
I didn't have this thought until you were just explaining or reminding me of your childhood in Romania. But Romania was it was under like the Iron Curtain until the 80s. Right?
Bogdan Geana
12:44
That's right. I had the incredible fortune or misfortune, I guess, depending on how you see it to grow up in my early years, and primary school in communism. And then in the 90s, with the hectic, chaotic mix of Western culture that was coming in from all sorts of languages and directions. I remember watching satellite TV shows that were American dubbed in German with Italian subtitles and things like that. So, it was it was a huge culture shock for me in the 90s. And again, a huge culture shock in the 2000s and beyond moving to the States.
Blake Howard
13:28
Yeah. I think that there's like irony in that because PBS is this public resource for news, non-biased news for information. And in a Communist government structure, there is no free press, it is controlled by the government. So, it's just it's interesting to me that you grew up without that until the 90s, then you were exposed to all kinds of Western influence that involved more free press. And then here you are leading the overhaul of the identity for PBS into your career.
Bogdan Geana
14:07
That's right. It's such a fairy tale.
Blake Howard
14:10
This coincidence was pretty cool. But the reality for PBS at the start of this project was no casual stroll around Mr. Rogers Neighborhood.
Bogdan Geana
14:20
You know, PBS had this just incredible heritage of really delivering insightful educational and inspiring content. And it has played such an important role in American lives for over half a century. But the media landscape around it was shifting quite dramatically. You have increased competition from all sorts of places, changing needs of viewers and even donors and just the explosion of digital platforms available to access content. And you know, to complicate matters, even more PBS had all these expressions of the brand across its 330 local member stations and third-party streaming platforms. So, it was clear that they needed to go beyond just the surface level refresh, that we needed to create greater consistency for maximum impact in this rapidly changing viewer and media landscape.
Blake Howard 15:25
From PBS perspective, did they have a lot of criteria for you? I mean, I'm sure they said, hey, we love what you did with Starbucks. We love how you kept the core there, but you modernized it? Did they say, do the same thing for us? But don't touch the little figure the symbol? Or don't touch the colors? Or don't touch this? Or that? Did they give you a lot of parameters that were sort of sacred cows? Or did they say just give us your recommendations.
Bogdan Geana
15:56
Prior to reaching out to us, the core team at PBS had actually done a really extensive audit of their communications. So, they came to us prepared and clearly aware of some of the main challenges. I'd like to say that the PBS had a flip phone brand in an iPhone world. And I think that summed it up pretty well. And so, as we developed the creative brief and shared that with the core team, we agreed together to push the creative and explore a broader range of concepts, especially in the initial round of exploration. So if someone on that team both on our end, and on the client side, felt quite strongly that we needed to take a really major leap forward to force viewer consideration, while others were concerned about potentially losing the strong equity, or potentially even wrongly alluding to this major shift in their programming, which was not going to be the case. And so, our exploration covered both ends of this spectrum.
Blake Howard
16:59
Yeah, so walk us through now how you started to solve the problem. And now you've got the brief, you've got some parameters. What did the creative process look like for you all as you as you got started?
Bogdan Geana
17:13
We begin by first developing a brand-new brand positioning. I believe PBS addresses this real need for trusted content that educates inspires and bring us all together. And that's especially important in today's world where content is made to sensationalize, to divide or even create outrage. And so, our new brand positioning centered on this really powerful purpose to be the beacon of thoughtful and thought-provoking media. From there, we also designed a set of design principles, moving, welcoming and bright. To really guide our design recommendations and the way we express the PBS brand across all these platforms. In the beginning of the project, we did a man on the street style interview, and included those findings in our creative brief. From speaking with people of varying backgrounds, we learned that PBS had this incredible heritage. But awareness was also fragmented. There were those who immediately recognize the brand. And then there were others who just had no idea what the brand was when we showed them the symbol without the name, PBS. And so, we knew we needed to reacquaint Americans with who PBS is and make sure that the brand continues to be top of mind. As far as the initial exploration, we literally explored hundreds and hundreds of iterations of the iconic PBS mark.
Blake Howard
19:05
Bogdan explained several of those explorations to me. They first thought about softening the crisp, sharp details and the characters to be less robotic feeling. They also explored cropping into the symbol going back to a single profile like the original P-man and adding the text PBS into a container shape. Most shocking of all, they explored removing the symbol all together, since the name had more equity than the symbol.
Bogdan Geana
19:32
I remember our first internal critique; it was quite exciting. We welcome most of our staff to participate and voice their opinions. I'm a strong believer in allowing more freedom, especially in the initial round allowing the crazy and the random to happen. And, you know, oftentimes it leads to some really interesting solutions and avenues going forward.
Blake Howard 20:01
I love that because you can always pull it back to reality. But sometimes in these in these evolutionary type projects, it's a little bit difficult to gauge what the client expectations really are. Because they've hired you to modernize it, and to do something beautiful and magical and next level, but you're pretty handcuffed and restrained. So, you don't want to go into an initial set of work, thinking, well, we can't change too much, because then they might be disappointed.
Bogdan Geana
21:02
That's right. If you, if you change, if you go too far, you could always rein it back in. And you're still sort of, you know, you're still sort of the creative heroes. But if you go too short, it's like, “Oh, I thought Bogdan was better than that.”
Blake Howard
You know, you're absolutely right. After some internal critique and refinement, the Lippincott team got ready to air their big debut of the progress for the PBS team.
Bogdan Geana
Our first presentation was actually in our office in New York, where the core PBS brand and marketing team came to see us. And we actually ended up revealing the entire initial exploration, which doesn't always happen. And, you know, we share it in all of its glorious imperfection. But we also grouped it around some of the categories that I just described earlier in our list of potential avenues. And that was just great excitement, anticipation, as you can imagine, we unveiled one territory at a time with some additional exploration, rough exploration around it. And, you know, there were some gasps, at times some frowns. But I think mostly smiles. As it usually is the case it's quite difficult to just take in and provide instant input on new work, especially when you've lived daily with the logo for so long. There was a lot of interest by the core team in directions that flipped the emphasis from symbol to the name to the point where the symbol was much more subtle and embedded in the type or just not there at all. So, after a couple of weeks of continued dialogue and additional refinements, we were asked to travel to DC and present directly to the top leadership. And that included Paula Kerger, who is the president and CEO, Jonathan Barzilay, the CEO and of course, Ira, the CMO. It was a little bit tense. I'll admit to that.
Blake Howard 22:51
Okay, Fade to black. It's time for the classic cliffhanger commercial break. When we come back, we find out if they could really be going down a route where they consider retiring the beloved P-man icon. All that more after the break.
Tracy Clark
23:12
Hey, listeners, if the brand nerd in you is digging our podcast, we've got good news for you. Blake, the host of this show wrote a book. It's called Radically Relevant, and it's full of insights and tips for CMOs and other brand leaders that are ready to get their brand unstuck and leveled up. There's also a pretty cool assessment tool to see just how radically relevant your brand is. For more on the book or to take the free Radically Relevant assessment check out www.radicallyrelevantbrands.com. Last but not least, don't forget to join the conversation on Instagram. See more about today's episode, share with a friend or send us an idea you might have for a future episode at a Change of Brand. All right back to the show.
Blake Howard
23:57
Okay, so here's where we left off. Bogdan and the Lippincott team are striving to create something that is modern, yet timeless for the PBS brand identity. They worked through an initial round of concepts for the visuals and presented them to their client team at PBS, which went well, and they seemed excited about the possibilities. Maybe even too excited. Some folks were starting to champion the idea of retiring the iconic symbol from the brand in favor of just the PBS letterforms. But before total madness broke out, the Lippincott team flew to DC to present to the top brass and restore some sanity. And it was a little bit tense.
Bogdan Geana
24:36
I'll admit to that. But you could really feel how important this was for them. And that was, you know, encouraging to see. They were really appreciative of the work and could really see why the core team would want to lean towards some of the simpler and more named driven designs, but ultimately, they felt that there was just too much equity in the symbol. And we really needed to retain that moving forward. And so, some team members were actually quite dejected about it, after all this build up in wild anticipation. But you know, we reassured them that there's still a lot of room for evolution in the logo, but especially in the broader expression toolkit, when you think about things like typography, and color and support, graphics, illustration, and so on. We went through a very thorough refinement process. And after that, where we adjusted and refined the drawing of the symbol, the scale, the placement, the proportion of each element, you know, it can be a really tedious process for most people. But the perfectionist in me actually geeks out over this stuff. A nice subtle detail, I would say we added in at that time was the slight adjustment of the noses of the profiles to tilt just a little bit upward, which gave the faces a slight upward gaze. This alludes to a sense of just deeper engagement with the content or feeling inspired, we thought that was a really nice subtle touch to it, is you know, the logo is just one aspect of the overall brand expression. Beyond that, we started to develop an imagery style that invites viewers to step into a bigger experience a distinct illustration style that evokes the logos, more human characteristics, or even a circular set of brand patterns to be used as secondary support graphics.
Blake Howard 26:46
The Lippincott team also worked on defining the PBS brand voice connecting back to the experience principles for the brand. They wanted it to sound moving, welcoming and bright, with more warmth and overall energy. Some example tactics were leading with a question to spark curiosity for a headline, finding a positive angle to tell a story or writing in the first person to feel more engaging. In addition to the brand voice, they also worked on motion principles for how the new visual identity should show up on screen. And let's talk a little bit about the blue because that was a significant shift. As far as like the brand, the major players of the brand, identity, shape, color content, shape stayed relatively the same, you tweaked the faces a little bit. The content did change, the type changed, but the color changed. And that was somewhat contentious. Could you tell us a little bit more and why that was a little contentious.
Bogdan Geana
27:49
Color was a big opportunity that we identified for this brand refresh. The existing identity was black and white. It was timeless, it was classic, but not necessarily very memorable. It tended to take a step back in the context of all the vibrant content that that PBS was showcasing. We agreed color could be a really powerful way to inject more energy into the core identity and really make it stand out. We explored a range of colors but pretty quickly started to focus on the blue. Some client team members and member stations voiced their concerns about this color choice. They told us PBS had been criticized unfairly, I would say for leaning left politically in their coverage. So, they were quite sensitive about this as being perceived as adopting Democrat blue. Blue, as we all know, is of course the most popular color in the US. And it also just projects trust and dependability, so we knew it was the right fit. Light blue had also been used quite prominently for some time on PBS digital platforms. And even the iconic P and Herb Lobalin’s initial design was colored blue. So, it was just a great match. So, we assured them that our blue was a different shade than Democrat blue, and that we would be totally fine in a world where even Fox News is blue. So eventually cooler heads prevailed.
Blake Howard 29:22
Can I rant for a minute about color decisions as it relates to branding? There are only so many options along the color wheel. Typically, corporate brands are seeking to choose just one, so no matter what you choose on the color wheel, it will be compared to something else. Black feels like a funeral. No way! Red feels like fast food gross! Orange I can't stand the University of Tennessee! Never yellow, what are we Sprint mobile now? Purple. Are you serious? We don't make egg plants! Blue? Geez! Snoozefest! Pink or magenta…do not even go there, we are not Barbie! These are all responses that can come from clients when you pitch a single color. And the moral of the story is color is very subjective. But with a little guidance and strong rationale, cooler heads can prevail. And in this case, simply saying if Netflix owns red, and Hulu owns green, well, maybe PBS will own blue, which, of course was strong rationale before Disney plus was on the streaming scene.
Bogdan Geana
30:37
That's right. There's often this this knee jerk reaction to compare work that you're seeing with things that you know, and that goes for both color and form and symbol and type. But it's not always relevant or meaningful to the project that you're working on.
Blake Howard
30:57
Throughout the process, Bogdan and the Lippincott team were coordinating with several partner agencies, like Nathaniel house studios for the broadcast package, Stephen Thomas Covet for sonic branding, and Jerome Mossy for illustration, one additional area of collaboration was on the custom typeface.
Bogdan Geana
31:18
And creating a custom typeface for a client is, I believe, more and more common these days. And it's not just the design fad. Even though there are countless solid type choices out there, I think it often comes down to just the cost of licensing versus the cost of designing and owning a font outright in perpetuity. And so, for PBS looking at the vast range of platforms and application types, it just made sense financially to own a typeface outright. So, we reached out to Monotype, with whom I've had the great opportunity to work on a number of projects in the past, with an initial font specimen. It was a rough sketch based on the logotype; we had just designed for PBS. And together, we ended up developing PBS Sans, that's their proprietary font family and 14 weights. And it was a very collaborative process throughout with key folks on the PBS team side who got to test the font in a variety of ways and made sure it addressed the multitude of needs that they had.
Blake Howard
32:28
I want to talk a little bit more about the member stations, because that's a big, complex component of this project. It’s really equipping them to understand the visual verbal identity and implement it because they're stewards of it. But they're partners and affiliates. So, you don't necessarily have this rigid control or centralized control, like you would at some other types of organizations, specifically a large corporation with a figurehead or a corporate structure. So how did you how did you get those member stations on board and feeling empowered with the update?
Bogdan Geana
33:09
That's a great question. I would say by far the greatest challenge for us was developing a strong but flexible brand architecture solution for such a complex system of local member stations, many of which had their own distinct identities, and had frankly been reluctant to adopt the broader PBS brand. Prior to the launch of the new identity. The PBS ecosystem really lacked this consistency, and it wasn't taking full advantage of the collective power of its brand. This logo freedom approach made it seem like PBS just had so many different brands. Compounding that was just the broader visual inconsistency across stations and content verticals and channels, and b2b and etcetera. We approached this by having lots of dialogue and frequent meetings of sharing. At times, we made sure to build enough flexibility in our recommendation to meet their unique needs. For example, some station names precede the PBS name. And so that was one of the flexible elements in our recommendation.
Blake Howard
34:18
You know, what's funny is we I've actually worked on one of the member stations on a project in Atlanta. Now, this one's tricky. And this one you might not like, because it probably breaks some of your system. But in Atlanta, there's a there's PBA that is in the Atlanta metro area, but then there's GPB, which is Georgia Public Broadcasting, and they get confused a lot. So, people are like, oh, yeah, I've given to you. I love GPB and they're like, we're PBA Atlanta. Oh, well, I guess I gave to the state, not the city version. And also in Atlanta, the PBA organization has an NPR affiliate as well, so they do radio and broadcast. So, they have had competing identities and then they merge together as one identity with a separate brand name, but it's still an affiliate. So, I think we broke your rules probably, but I intimately understand the member station challenges. And you know, they want they want to be connected to the brand, but they also want to fundraise in their local market, or they want to get ad revenue. And they really want to create their own brand, but they're small potatoes compared to the parent brand. So, they kind of have to carry both, you know, and do this delicate balance.
Bogdan Geana
35:40
That's right, you said it perfectly. And that's really just the tip of the iceberg when it came to the complexity of the reality in the local markets.
Blake Howard
35:53
Before the refresh officially launched publicly, Lippincott worked closely with member stations to ensure people understood the big picture and how to use the new brand identity. They hosted coast to coast sessions and webinars with handouts, worksheets and time for Q&A.
Bogdan Geana
36:11
I remember one of the final presentations, when we were showing the broader system toolkit, one of the station representatives got up and said, this work is terrible, it’s way too simple and straightforward. It lacks the beauty and the detail of the previous broadcast package, and it's never going to work. And so, you get all kinds of reactions, but you just need to stay the course and to be, you know, logical about it and to calmly explain the nuance and the detail and the reason and in the end, we feel like it was a great success.
Blake Howard
36:51
Well, it turns out that station rep was wrong. Overall, the public launch was pretty smooth, and most people appreciated the evolution. I dug up a few snarky blog posts about how standardizing PBS in general was actually a bad move making it all feel to corporate and not local enough, which is how stations rely on fundraising support. Another article I found criticized how a nonprofit like this shouldn't be spending two years and a lot of money just to pick a new color. Even though this project was largely successful, and really well received Bogdan, however, said it was not without challenges.
Bogdan Geana
37:33
From my perspective, the greatest challenge was to maintain consensus, engagement and buy in across all teams. And so, we really made it a point to overshare, over socialize our progress with multiple teams, including member station representatives and partner agencies and, and to really do it in a way that felt inclusive and has an open dialogue and not just the top-down decision. I would say from a design standpoint, the challenge was mainly to create a brand-new expression that flows seamlessly from the broadcast environment to digital platforms and to print and beyond. And of course, from a logo standpoint, just don't mess it up.
Blake Howard
38:18
I love that! Yeah. Okay, let's talk about some takeaways. I am so glad PBS did not drop their iconic symbol Thank the heavens. Bogdan and the Lippincott team honored the legacy of the brand and just did some minor updates. Choosing the blue was a risky decision but also felt like a natural progression for the brand. For me, the biggest impact is felt when you see the visual system working across major touchpoints. Like the PBS streaming platform or their broadcast package, it's a tremendous step forward. Perhaps the biggest takeaway is their approach to change management. PBS has a unique organizational model. And that model has a lot of benefits. But one downside is the control of the brand. They needed to find a way to get 300-plus member stations to opt-in to that change. In a typical corporate structure, you would just mandate change, but here you have to get those member stations to want to change, and that change would require some investment from them. New signs, swag, local ads on air packages and more would all need to be produced. To cover some of those costs. PBS corporate gave out 79 grants to member stations to help fund those rebranding efforts. Some have even dropped their individual brand names to incorporate further into the PBS fold. Like KRLU in Austin, Texas became Austin PBS, and Wisconsin Public Television became PBS Wisconsin, not my beloved WABE in Atlanta, however, we are rogue down here in The A. It's after all, like Jermaine Dupri said, “Where the players play”. This is a common theme you've probably heard on this show a lot. But the real work is bringing people along on the journey. It's not only about the design work, in this case, if you mapped out 100% of their total time put into the project, I bet 75% of it was spent in meeting, in sessions, helping usher along the PBS corporate team and their affiliates. The real skill is building alignment and gently facilitating groups toward a better understanding of the brand and what the best practices might be. And in the end, it all paid off.
Bogdan Geana
40:53
I would say the most encouraging sign of our success was the fact that right away, over 70% of the member stations committed to adopt the new identity system. And that was a big concern for the core team at PBS because there had been so much reluctance in the past. And that happened within the first year of the launch. I also personally love seeing the vibrant blue avatar and social media every time I turned on Instagram, you know, posts and stories and even on platforms like Amazon Video, I feel like it really stands out. And I think it was the right choice color wise. Oh, and on a personal note, I think just the other day my fifth grader son was telling me he had been studying about the US Civil War in school. And he was really curious to find out more. And right away the first thought that crossed my mind was, you know, it's time to watch Ken Burns Civil War documentary with you.
Blake Howard
41:53
I love that it's time to usher into manhood son. That's right. I'm watching the Ken Burns Civil War documentary with slow pans. And learn what Ken Burns effect really means.
Bogdan Geana
42:06
That's right. The father son bonding moment, I think for so long PBS has had and continues to have such a positive impact on American life. And so yes, I think it was worth it.
Blake Howard
42:22
One show postscript before we wrap, in July of this year in 2022, to the dismay of many, the beloved PBS Kids green logo with the big-eyed cartoonish character that has been around for 22 years, was replaced with a simple blue circle with PBS Kids in their custom typeface. To take us home on this special episode. Here's the closing theme music from the PBS classic “The Lawrence Welk Show.”
Special thanks to Bogdan Geana and the team at Lippincott for giving us the inside look into this change of brand. To see more visuals from today's episode, head on over to www.achangeofbrand.com. And if you liked today's show, share it with a friend or leave us a review on Apple podcasts or Spotify. Today's episode was edited by Gabe Kitzman, fact checked by Jill Jeffries, written in part by Pamela Hinman and produced by Patrice fielder. Special thanks to Tracy Clark for our briefing and Rachel Jackson for today's artwork. I'm your host, Blake Howard, signing off.