Hi, I'm Paige Albany Act, I'm the Royal Director of Promax, and this is the Daily Free Talk House. Today, I have the honor and the privilege of being with Bo Bishop, who is the second Director of Creative Strategy, and Elliot Chakra, Executive Creative Director at New York City-based Towel Bank and Company. We are talking about Towel Bank's work with ABC to refresh their brand, that first went live back in August, I believe. Hello, gentlemen, thank you so much for being with me.
Hello, thank you, baby. Hello, and it's my pleasure. So before we start, this is a real question. Can you explain to me, I was just looking at both your titles and I was like, okay, these are pretty similar, but just explaining to me the difference between Executive Creative Doctor and Executive Director of Creative Strategy, I will start with Elliot.
Thank you, hi, my side of things, I work very closely with Bo and the strategy team, but I'm not the words man and more images and design systems, so if that's the simple answer, that's mine, I think Bo might have a better way of saying it. No, thanks Elliot, yeah, so the simple answer is that I lead our strategy, and writing practice at Towel Bank and Elliot leads the creative practice in terms of design, so often those things interlap and intersect with each other, overlap and intersect with each other, obviously. So we work very closely hand in hand just to make sure that thinking and making and creating are all coming from the same place. Okay, thank you.
How did this whole project with ABC get its start? Start with Bo, we just have to switch it around. Yeah, this was a project that came out of several other projects that we had worked with. We've had the pleasure of working with ABC and clients across the Walt Disney Company for a number of years, so actually several of our clients from a box entertainment rebrand that we did in 2019 were at ABC at this point in 2020 and brought us in to help them work on the brand at that level as well.
And anything to add Elliot? Yeah, I think one really exciting part for us was that it was a direct award based on the Fox work. So I mean, you didn't have to pitch. Right, and we love that kind of process.
I mean, we love pitching too, but there's something really nice when you have a direct award. You know, you can just get the sleeves up a lot earlier and get in there and sort of really sort of shape the thing together, rather than some of the other processes that take a little longer and resources get diluted across other companies, basically. So when you said this, you got this in 2020, so what was the brief? What did the brief look like and how long did you have to work on it?
We started in in artist in January of 2020. The brief was a good time for everybody. Exactly, the perfect time to start this. Honestly, it was a really exciting beginning to the process.
We, Elliot and I and Betsy, our intrepid producer, spent, gotta get for a shout out, by the way, spent a week or so in the offices in LA, just doing a lot of really deep dive intake with people, talking to stakeholders, talking to people about the brand. And one thing that really came out of that was, there are a few things at work. They needed an identity and design a brand that really functioned beautifully and seamlessly across platforms, including digital and social and all those wonderful touch points that we have at our fingertips now. The brand that they were working with at the time, I think as we all know is entertainment fans listening to this podcast, or we know that ABC is an iconic brand, it's gone through many different iterations over the years.
So some of the more 3D iterations that they've had of the brand don't necessarily scale or weren't necessarily designed to scale for the digital and social platforms that we have now. So that's one thing that we learned early on, just a practical need to update the identity for modern touch points, but also the desire to, the quote at the time was to bring the swagger back to the brand and in some ways broadcast in general and to really embrace the medium and really give ABC really permission to take a bold step forward. That was the mandate, that was the desire internally that we found working with the stakeholders. And so I think those two things, the desire to modernize the brand, to bring the swagger back a bit to the brand and then to really establish the ABC brand as its own entity within the larger Disney ecosystem.
So two questions about that. One is, this is like a 101, I'm not a designer question. Why doesn't a 3D logo or look translate across platforms? And then the bigger question is, when you're considering not so much the tactical look and feel of what you do, but the strategic part, what kind of things did you discuss in terms of what was needed to quote unquote bring the swagger back?
On the second point, it was interesting because I think one thing that was crucial as well beyond just the tactical issue of 3D scaling was they wanted to really hard target female audience as well, and actually obviously be inclusive of men, but still lean it more in that direction. And so, yeah, on that note of the swagger, one of the fun comments that came up in one of our interviews was, we make cool shit for all the women, and that was kind of an exciting sort of. You know? You can't really use that in your tagline though.
Right, but we love this segment a bit, right? And so that kind of related later on to sort of how we even took the flat stuff into a little bit more of the glossy, shiny look. And then I've definitely forgotten the first question you saw. It was why does 3D not scale across digital platforms?
Right, I mean, generally 3D is not designed to scale, right? So when, I guess, when former companies had done that, iteration, you know, it was obviously more for sort of big expressive IDs and things like that, right? So, obviously you can make 3D scale, but I think it's beyond just a 3D question. I think those practical implications will be affiliates that, you know, there's like hundreds of other logos that this logo has to lock up with.
Quite frankly, there's a lot of different shapes and sizes and colors and designs that these literally have to sit with. So it was also a strategic idea to simplify and maybe ABC might not compete with all of those affiliates and be a simpler offering in general and more iconic in a way. I think an important point here too is that, typically a lot of the assets that you see in terms of an identity for a specifically a TV network, you know, quote unquote, tend to work really beautifully and have been designed for a screen experience on a TV. What we found over the years at Trollback and Elliot and I in our practice together, we really try to approach every brand as we would a Nike or an Apple or a brand that is a consumer brand that has to work across any sort of space or service or screen.
So the 3D question is less about how to, like 3D itself could scale to different surfaces and touch points, but the reality is that a lot of television brands have been specifically designed for television and what we found is like our work with box or with TDS or ABC or any number of effects, any number of these brands is that if you philosophically shift and think about them as entertainment brands that have to come to life everywhere, rather than broadcast brands that have to come to life on television and you start to design and think about the brands outside of the linear television space, it opens up a lot of really interesting opportunities and creates a way more flexible brand. Do you find that the puppy more of an Elliot question, do you find that more limiting or expansive as a designer? No, it's part of our philosophy as well. I mean, just to sort of give a little trollback plug here, Jacob, I found that he has this philosophy that we use as much as possible, which is this guy, everything that means nothing.
And so to us, if something is meaningless and then just adds more confusion, why do it? So what we also do as well from the strategic side of what we're talking about is modern brands have fundamental elements and then they flex them. But it doesn't mean that he needs to flex them all the time. He just flex them when, as and where is needed.
So for us, it was more of that, like bring it back down to a new level. Very soon after the brand launched, they were already doing 3D extrusions of it in a sort of studio environment, but it wasn't an on-screen element. It was actually in the set, you know, as a physical kind of light box. You know, I think it's that sort of that idea of do it when it's appropriate, but don't try and make something that wasn't meant to be reduced really small as a favicon or whatever.
It's kind of like strip it down to it sort of bare essence and then they can tear it down as needed. Right, because one thing we encounter a lot, especially with entertainment brands, and I'll say television brands in general, even though I don't really like that term, I think that what you find is often, it's very easy to think about the brands in terms of or in context with the content. So talent or with assets from the shows, the brand can align with those really easily, but the question always for us is, what if we had an empty billboard? We couldn't use any show assets, and we only had the brand to tell the story.
That's why for us it becomes really essential to have those foundational elements, like a Nike box to go back to that example. You've got the swoosh, you've got the Nike wordmark, you've got the iconic orange, and all of a sudden you have a brand that can almost live on any surface or space, and then those foundational elements should be flexible enough that you can do ton of really creative and expressive things with them, but you always have the foundational elements that you can go back to to really to the brand, everything. It is funny, because you've mentioned Nike, and honestly that box popped up right in my head, so you're right about that. So, but with a brand like ABC, the term you didn't like was it broadcast brand or television brand, because I feel like yeah, no brand is not in the brand anymore.
But those brands like CBS, ABC, NBC, I do find them, do you find them hard to quote unquote brand because they are so broad, or how do you approach that? And let's ask it with some of our ABCs and that's what we're talking about. I think it's, I'll start with this one. I think it's challenging for Mr.
Tijic point of view. Because I feel like that's everything, right? Like they're doing pretty different things, yeah. Exactly, so it's hard to, sometimes it's difficult or challenging, I'll say to really differentiate beyond just the content when it's very easy for something like Comedy Central or Food Network to really own a space because they're only a very specific genre, a very specific category, whereas someone like CBS or ABC or Fox, they're very much, they're creating, yeah, they're creating and delivering a lot of very diverse content and it goes, it's not even comedy drama unscripted, it's also news, it's sports, it's everything in between, it's daytime, it's affiliate content.
So you really need to define a strategy that is flexible enough, I would say elastic enough to really encompass all of that, but apply it all of it. And so what we did with ABC is really hone in on, I think what makes the brand special, which is they've always, in my opinion, and I think in the opinion of a lot of stakeholders at the brand, they've always been really emotionally compelling. They very, very much want to connect with people emotionally and I think that really aligns with the larger Walt Disney company brand strategy trying to make making people happy as their purpose. We identified early on that emotions are really key to ABC and I think more than a lot of their direct competitors, they really lean into programming that Paul Lee, their former president would say is smart with heart, right?
It's emotionally compelling, but it's also intelligent and it pushes culture forward with things like modern family or blackish, things that really reflect modern culture in a way that's real, but also pushes modern culture forward. So those two things together, this idea of moving people in terms of emotions and in terms of culture really became the centerpiece of the brand. And that's something that can apply across the board, because we're moved by sports, we're moved by unscripted programming, we're moved by, you know, specials, live events, all of these things can be, they have an emotional core to them, that can be drawn out and I think ABC does that really well. You want anything there, Elliot?
I think, you know, you're talking about other brands like NBC and everything in them. One's with such a legacy, right? And I think that's obviously a very strong thing with ABC too, right? Especially as opposed to as they connect with emotions, but people's have an emotional attachment to the logo and we did a lot of obviously design, thinking around, you know, can you even change this logo?
And of course we did a lot of exploration and of course we came all the way back to it. Yeah, but you didn't change it very much, right? Right, but the things that we did actually changed a lot of the way it could be used and deployed and so that's really the whole, the underpinning of why we did it. Can you elaborate on that?
So talk a little bit about since I run a podcast and because everyone can see it, but I will be in the post on brief, you can see what the logos look like. But explain where you started, where you ended up, why? And then how you found that useful in terms of deploying what Bo just talked about. Yeah, so we started with a lot of exploration, trying out, you know, how far can we push them up?
What do we want it to say? How can it express itself in a different way? And then we obviously came back to the fact that the legacy of full brand, you know, is just so strong. People love it, it's a very iconic mark, but it did need some adjustments for the way we wanted to take it.
So what we actually did was we truncated the stem of the B and we sort of expanded the letter forms a little bit as well because at one point we were even thinking, could this even sit without the circle around it? Some of the early exploration really tried to push that as well. You mean the letter forms? Exactly, sorry, yeah, yeah.
So, you know, could they sit down the bottom as a bug and still have strength? And with the current logo is definitely too thin for that. You know, what we wanted to do is obviously pay homage to Paul Rand, you know, we called it a rebrand instead of a rebrand instead of a rebrand. But then the other crucial thing we did was we, the counters of the letter forms are like the holes in the middle, we optimally centered them and balanced them more perfectly to then make the letter forms around.
But so that meant that when we have an animation, these three letter, these three dots would be, you know, the sort of kinetic, you know, sort of catalyst for all the brand exploration in terms of IDs and transitions and bug animation wipes and, you know, everything. So, by literally sort of making a much more solid foundational, you know, four circles really, pretty much to come together to do a thing. We had something that then had a lot more, you know, you didn't have to resenter the camera as you're zooming in, for example, those kind of like simple design things that are annoying. You know, you just want everything to be, like, really perfect and straight.
The mandate at the beginning was really interesting from our partners at ABC, they basically said, like, should we keep the same logo? Should we explore something totally new? So we actually, you know, when we started it in January and February, 2020, basically anything and everything is on the table. And so we did a pretty extensive exploration into new logos for the brand, much to the chagrin of many of our designers, who were DePaul Rand.
Well, I'm gonna say to the chagrin, because none of that work was used, but, you know, that's an option to offer. Yeah, that's true, that's true. I think very early on in that process, you know, it sounded really exciting to explore that, and it was, but I think we all realized really quickly that, you know, this is, for me, growing up as a kid and watching television and being obsessed with television, it's an iconic brand, and to me, it's on the same level as a Levi's or Coca-Cola or Ford, you know, in terms of iconic American brand. So very quickly, we decided, let's not, let's not epic something that isn't broken, right?
So what we just did, like Elliot described, is how can we create a more functional representation of the logo that potentially has the ability to become a system with a solid circle, the ring logo, and then potentially even the letter forms by themselves. Yeah, it was exciting to explore, but I think right away, kind of we realized that it would be a real system shock to see a completely different logo after all these decades. That's good to say, it's interesting how, I mean, just thinking about if they had rolled out a completely different brand, it would feel uncomfortable, disruptive, I mean, then you're like, it's a TV brand, it's not an epic deal, but I can see what you're saying, whereas, I mean, even something as simple as NPR changed, it's morning edition music, we did a whole thing about it, and now I'm very used to it, but at the time, I remember that feeling very rattling. And on the main day and age of constant disruption, it's better to just leave something sort of close to the same, right?
We're putting this up in as it is. Yeah, I think there's, there are kind of three things that we always talk about in terms of branding, consistency, creativity, and cohesion, the three Cs. There's something so compelling about consistency, right? Like hearing the same thing, seeing the same thing, and becoming accustomed to it, and getting an emotional attachment to it too.
So we kind of realized that it would be the trail of our strategy as a brand, you know, with this idea of creating emotional connections with people and to kind of pull the rug out from everyone. So yeah, it became just an extension of the strategy to kind of just remake and redraw the logo, but to really retain its essence. Right, and then beyond just the mark itself, you know, we did a lot of color palette exploration at the beginning. You know, this is the sort of early stage before the pandemic hit, you know, and we had a palette that was inspired by Pinot Grigio and Mojito, and you know, really sort of push it a little bit.
Is that a green? What you're saying? Yeah, yeah, it was almost like a Tiffany kind of green with this like, no kind of thing, and it was really nice and very sophisticated. And, you know, I think some of the feedback that kind of came back from that was it was really strong, really bold, really had pushed it.
But maybe it was a little, you know, by coastal and they wanted to be much more inclusive, and then it's the sort of legacy of the red, that, you know, kind of comes back on the table. But we also wanted to re-address the red color as well, once we settled on red because, you know, obviously ESPN is part of the portfolio, and not so much of a female for a brand. So it's really about finding that perfect red and that perfect dark blue to kind of sit it with so it's not too heavy black red and white, and I think it actually has a little sensitivity to it as well. One thing that it's funny that you just made me remember this Elliot, but we did a few days of workshops with employees at the brand early on, and I asked them the question that the popular brand strategist question of if ABC was a drink, what would it be?
Kind of open-ended and everyone. Rosé? Everyone across the board said wine of some kind. So it was Rosé, it was, Rosé is very much where we landed in terms of the feeling of the brand, which I think is great and that aligns really well with something like the Oscars, you know, which is black tie, but fine.
I'm gonna say probably Rosé, yeah. Yeah, exactly. So we were really, actually we, I don't know if you remember this Elliot, but we started, we didn't start by designing frames for TV or digital or so. We started by designing wine bottles and chocolate bars for the brand and that was sort of our way in because I often feel like for our designers and Elliot and I talk about this all the time, it's inspiring to start with something that isn't actually gonna be, you know, implemented in the brand.
It's really cool if it does, like, I was involved with the Comedy Central Rebrand a few years ago and they actually made a beer to actually produce the beer. Yeah, it was part of our palette. Exactly, with the summer ale. I love that actually, yeah.
So we were hoping, secretly hoping that we would end up getting, you know, a couple cases of wine and some chocolate out of this. Not secretly, for me, yeah. But it's really fun to kind of encapsulate, take the spirit and energy of the vibe that's coming of these meetings and these conversations that we're having and excitement from it and turn it into something that people are, who doesn't love wine and chocolate, you know what I mean? So it's a great way to really get ourselves immersed in the vibe of the brand.
And I think it's still true to what the brand is now. And I think you said it perfectly page, like the rose, the red wine feeling of it, I think it's still really comes through. You know what that is, I think, back to you really quickly, but I think it's because back in the day with scandal and they had the gladiators and they would all drink red wine and eat popcorn right, that was the whole thing. Yeah, so I feel like that gets really tight into that overall brand, which is interesting that it's attached so firmly.
I was just going to add, I mean, part of obviously what Bo and his team do so well is the language, the tone of voice and everything like that. And quite early on in our development, as we look back to Paul Rand, he also had done this book all about play and it was fascinating to look at it and also look at the way he designed and his stuff is very playful, but also mature. And then in the strategy workshops, one of the stakeholders basically said, and we quoted them, but they don't hear to play, ABC is here to play, and we just love that idea. Not necessarily like playing like with our toys, but more like we're a player on the stage.
We are here to play. The mock-up stage like Bo's talking about, we'd like make a matchbox that says, here's to spark things up or, you know, we would just like play with that language a lot and explore it across different touch points with the palettes and the design system. And then you sort of come backwards from all that into the broadcast world, but okay, how can we sort of translate this now? I want people to think ABC is here to play with the quote.
And when we heard that- Right, right, because you've got sports and you've got the reality, yeah. Yeah, so we did that exact thing, because what you're saying, we put that phrase over, scandal over NFL football over, you know, all these different things and Jimmy Kimmel and it still continued to work. And that really became the ethos, like, let's play, let's have fun. Let's make the brand really exciting and energizing and kind of sexy and cool.
That was our mandate. And I think that that's shining through. The thing that happened along the way is a global pandemic, which global pandemic, a lot of social unrest and that really changed the tenor of, not necessarily the vision for the brand, but we always say that brands are never launched or never live in a vacuum, right? You always have to be aware of what's going on, not only internally at the brand with your own motivators, but also what's happening in this current moment in culture.
I don't think it caused us to really deviate from anything that we were doing, but definitely influenced the work in terms of maybe, you know, initially wanting to be a bit more brash or bold or. Yeah, how lighthearted could you be? Right, exactly, exactly. Because I think that emotions, you know, the beautiful thing about them is there's a whole spectrum of them and the brand is still able to modulate based on those different emotions that are going on.
So yeah, it was interesting. Let's go back to the palette really quickly before we wandered too far away from it, which is, can you just elaborate then, where did you guys ultimately end up on what the palette is? And I do think it's a good idea to name all palettes after alcohol for the record. Yeah, so we landed on this specific red and this specific dot bluey black as the primary.
And then as an accent to that, we would add this kind of lighting machine as if you're like peeling a page of a magazine. So it's not like 3D lighting, it's just more like a wipe of light, a bit of hint at that, you know. Like Saturn or something like that. Yeah, and so then that applied to the backgrounds that we put things on as well, this differentiation of tones that has like ramping cues going through, you know, just to sort of keep it flat, but also alive with some kind of stuff.
A little lux. Yeah, exactly. And then we also did a secondary palette as well. So that is also part of the mix.
There's like a blue and a yellow and an orange and things like that. Definitely leaned heavily into the red. And what was the thinking there in terms of, me kind of discussed it, but what was the thinking there in terms of sticking with the red? Just because it was something that people were already very familiar with.
So you didn't want to go too far afield. And red is certainly a very emotional color, I think. Right, it almost, I'd be honest, like came from, yeah, a lot of thinking, I think on their side as well internally, you know, how far do we want to take people, kind of to some of those points as well, but it was just definitely where we landed out because of a lot of the legacy that they have with it. We know that also Disney, they do often like to lean into the legacy of these 10 more brands as well.
So it was definitely a collaborative discussion. Yeah, and I think there's like a sexiness to it too, right? Like not to be too reductive, but the idea of like a pop of lipstick. There's something really rich about the color that, you know, while we really enjoyed exploring, you know, the Pinot or the Prosecco, the gold, and then the moquito kind of like green that we were working with.
Like you said, Paige, I think we ultimately kind of came back. We kept coming back to this red because it felt more evocative and more almost black tie in some instances. And also it's just really nice to have a color that you can lean into and own, you know, especially when we're all bombarded with so much information constantly. I think, again, that consistency is really important.
That cohesive quality of the brand is really important. And I think for us, the red ultimately got us there. There's so many things about red that I can attach to ABC, for example, you know, talking about emotions, passion, love if you're talking about the Oscars, which is a big brand for ABC, you know, it's red carpet. Then I think, yeah, it makes sense.
Pretty drastic switch to go to something more, I don't know, it feels like a little lighter and more frothy if you went to, you know, Prosecco, Mihito type palette. Yeah, our inspiration I think really early on was also kind of like the feeling of an alley or Lexus SUV, right? Something that feels a little bit elevated and confident. And so Ellie and I talk a lot of times, a lot about like, what makes these brands feel like luxury brands.
And I think the confidence is there to only use a few elements to convey their messaging. And so whenever you see them, you associate them with those brands. And I think the less, the more we kind of stripped away from the brand, the more it felt confident and like aligned with that vision of an elevated kind of luxury brand almost. Did you do a kind of word cloud around the brand?
Cause just some of things are saying emotional, confident, compelling. Did you guys have other words like that that you were associating with the overall brand? Yeah, for sure. We generated a large list of words during our interview process.
And then over two days of brand workshops, we kind of narrowed those down to their essential few. The, I don't want to give away all the secret sauce, but the words, you know, that we continue to talk about, I think are really essential to the brand, you know, being emotionally compelling, being character driven, just connecting with people on that level, I think is something that's really important to the brand. So, you know, I just associate ABC with these really iconic stories and characters. And I think a lot of people do, like you just mentioned, scandal or, you know, how to get away with murder, modern family, whatever it is.
It's- Great, anatomy. Yeah, great anatomy. There's just a feeling that you get from the brand that I think transcends definition. And so what we try to do, just like when we work with Fox, because I think there's a feeling with Fox that transcends definition as well.
So it's tricky to kind of define that without ruining the magic of it, you know, like, how do you maintain the special sauce strategically without believing it? Yeah, although internally or in your work, I'm sure you're very precisely defining it. Yes, yes. That's totally fine if you don't know the larger world.
No, it's great because, you know, I think our perspective on strategy is that it should reflect the brand. So whenever trying to be prescripted, the strategy should feel like it's coming from the tone in the spirit and energy of the brand. So we try to write language that was really evocative and emotionally connective and compelling in the work itself. So rather than being defined, I think, by a few words, I think the spirit of the brand more than anything was really, yeah, I don't know, just this idea of moving people was the thing that we kept coming back to in every sense of those words.
One thing you guys kind of touched on before was doing a brand that has to work across all facets of ABC. So when you're doing these kinds of brand refreshes or rebrands for somebody like ABC, it's an interesting challenge, right? Because you've got to go all the way up to corporate, all the way down to digital platforms, all the way across 200 or however many ABC affiliates and push their own station. So it has to work in a lot of context and you have to serve a lot of clients.
So did you have to experience sort of the full gamut of that? Or was your assignment a little simpler? And then they sort of took that out across the company? How did that work?
Yeah, essentially, our assignment was to set the rules, the guidelines, give motion examples. We'll actually make physical motion pieces, create toolkits for the affiliates where they could customize some of the elements according to things that we gave them straight rules about. Unfortunately, we didn't get to do chocolate or wine bottles, it's still an option, it's still a possibility. But yeah, we had an amazing meeting with the affiliates who were very excited about going flat and simple coloured because of problems they've been trying to solve for a long time.
So things like that were very fluid. We just gave them the file and they've gone up with it and it's been really exciting to see some of those things ripple out. OK, but you did have to consider it because you had to create toolkits that started out to accommodate that. Yeah, within reason, we didn't create specific toolkits for how to put a decal on a bus or a broadcast track or something.
You know what I mean? For the most part, it's like digital, social, style guides, ton of voice toolkits like After Effects Toolkits for all of the deliverables for the platforms. OK, but still no small task. That's not quite as detailed as having to do all 200 affiliates, but it's still pretty broad.
Yeah, we'd probably still be going if that was OK. Yeah, oh my goodness. Yeah, those rebranding things are really huge. The other thing I wanted to talk about, and I'm going to give myself a space right here where I'm going to insert the new mnemonic.
When you guys, as part of this, were you tasked with doing the mnemonic or was that something that they went and said out separately, they worked or you worked with a company called YouTube Canwoo, which I loved so much. We loved them too. So let me start with you to talk about how that whole part of this evolved. Yeah, it was always a part of the process from the beginning.
And we have the luxury of Alex Molten, who is the chief creative officer at Trollbacking Company, owned and ran a sonic branding studio for about 12 years. He's very deeply interested in and engaged with sound and music still today. So very much a part of what we do. So from the beginning, we would be working with the mnemonic and approaching it.
And like I said at the beginning, everything was on the table at the beginning of this process. And a lot of it, even though we ended up back to a lot of the things that defined the roots and the foundation of the brand for a long time, we didn't radically change that much, at least on a cursory view of the brand. But we did want to approach the mnemonic from a fresh point of view, also knowing that the same thing happens with sound as with design in an identity where the sound of the brand, the sonic branding needs to live and breathe across all these new touch points and spaces as well. So the evolution of the mnemonic was really, again, looking at where the brand has been and where they're going in the future.
And Elliott can talk about a little bit more practically working with you too. We love working with them, but he was very much involved in that process. We've worked a lot with you two can move on jobs for Apple, Spotify, NBC Upfronts. And we just have a very good working relationship within their extremely generously, always do great demos.
And yeah, we did a whole demo phase with other companies as well, and they just rose to the top. And what they actually did was, if you hear the original, mnemonic, it has four notes. And what we did. I can hear it in my head right now.
Yeah, we took three of them, because there's only three letters in the logo, and it made sense to discuss everything that means nothing. So that was the first thing they did. And then obviously, they did a lot of exploration and different instrumentation. And we proposed, you could flex it like this and like that.
But for the purposes of the actual launch, we just kind of catch it simply with one final audio bed. This is the one area where I think you guys also kind of touched on it, which is that if you feel like it changed a fair amount, you had a lot of creative room to run on the mnemonic. Yeah. I have a weird new fan love affair with mnemonics.
I don't know why, but I really like them personally. Oh, you should get Alex to do his sonic branding presentation to you. And I'm going back to emotions so intrinsically tied with them as well. You know, I remember Elliot's son even talking.
He heard the ABC mnemonic one, and he's like, oh, that's ABC. You know, so there's an emotional connection and a practical connection that we make with brands. And knowing that a brand needs to live and breathe across all of these new touch points, like smart speakers, where there might not even be a visual element to it. So having that mnemonic that could work across all these spaces was really, really important for the brand.
Yeah, I think that's the part I find so interesting is that how much it connects emotionally and how much I think people don't realize it. But then, yeah, if you can, I'm sure now that we've mentioned the four note old ABC mnemonic, everybody can hear it in their heads too. Alex always says just quickly out to this is, you know, you can't switch off your ears. You can, you know, to both points, well, you can like not see something, like in the kitchen, you're like not looking at the table, you know, the TV or whatever, but you can still hear.
So yeah, it just cuts through. It's really important to have a good, you want to? Yeah, I agree. All right, last question.
So now that this is all said and done, do you guys find that it's harder to do a brand refresh like this where you end up sort of making very strategic tweaks or do you think it's harder to just wholesale rebrand something? A great question. Yeah, I think it's harder to do anything in a pandemic. Yeah, you're back.
The simple answer is, you know, we love both tasks, honestly. It's always a good challenge, no matter what it is. Like if you have tight guardrails or a set of assumed tight guardrails that you're going to need to work with, then it's a really good discipline to sort of keep something iconic. But you know, there is iconic in love, but also make it feel like a new, you know, like a nice new pair of shoes that you can walk in and feel more confident, for example.
I think that that's that's one side of it. On the other side, we love it when, you know, we're given carte blanche to just like dream big and stuff from scratch. I mean, Patrick's example, when we rebranded the weather channel, David Clark, he had a mantra for us, which was make it hurt. Things like that.
It's almost like cool shit for all the women. Really powerful shorts. They really inspire you. Wait, what if you need my make it hurt?
For you? Oh, no, no, no. Sorry. Yeah.
No, no, no. The internal people who are very, you know, who had a lot of different technologies plugged into the screen and it's going to be very crowded and it's unconsidered as an entire ecosystem and how it translates to both. Basically, they were like, yeah, live up the floor. And for us, that was great, you know.
I kill your darlings kind of. Yeah, exactly. We'll have to move on. Yeah.
What we find a lot. It's never hard. Like neither. Nothing is, I don't feel like it's difficult or hard.
It's always just a blessing to be able to do what we do. Honestly, I feel like that. Like, this is, we get to help people, you know, entertain the world and that's amazing. It's just different.
I think what we often find is, like, Elliot just mentioned with the weather channel examples that the people that we work with are collaborators inside the brands live and breed the brands 24 hours a day. They're so used to the processes that they've been doing. They're so used to living with the brand and seeing brands constantly that it's sometimes challenging to think about things in a new way. And often what we find during the strategic process early on working with someone is that a philosophical shift can be really powerful, right?
So that's just the difference between thinking of yourself as a broadcast television network versus a modern entertainment brand. Once that philosophical shift happens, everyone gets really excited about the process. So I think it's just a matter of returning to our objective. Like what are we really trying to accomplish together, reminding people that this isn't about subjectivity, right?
It's not about us liking or disliking something. It's about creating work that's appropriate to the objective and then just helping everyone to stay excited and engaged in the process. And that's the fun part. What you're saying is you would serve as both brands, consultants and therapists as you.
Oh, for sure. That's one of the blessings of what we do is getting to sit down with people in it. That's really what in the age of COVID is the ability to really get in a room with everyone and get to the bottom of things. And sometimes it does turn into therapy for both of us but in the best way.
All right. I will leave it there. Although I feel like in the next couple of years you'll have plenty of opportunities to provide therapy for many people. So get ready.
Thank you guys so much. And congratulations on it. I really appreciate it. Thank you.
Yeah, thank you. Great. Have an awesome day and have a great time. Bye.
Bye. That's it for this episode of the Daily Brief Podcast. If you have suggestions for conversations, please reach out to us on Facebook and LinkedIn at Promx Global or on Instagram and Twitter at Promx Undersport Global. You can also email us at dailybrief at Promx.org and you can subscribe to the Daily Brief Podcast on Apple Podcast where you can also read and review us or on Google Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.
And as always, thanks for listening. Thanks for listening.