CLIENT
The only all-comedy network, currently seen in more than 98 million homes nationwide and airs award-winning programming, including The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, The Colbert Report, South Park and Tosh.0.
BRIEF
Comedy Central needed a branding solution that more firmly attached the network to their programming while reaching a younger audience. We began with the insights that (1) comedy is inherently social, and (2) the content needed to travel in a branded way across platforms. On a basic branding level, the challenges revolved around issues of scale and transportability that the logo and branding needed to address. Because a network is a brand that houses other brands — shows, content, personalities — we needed to create a system that celebrated the rich content (the programming) without abandoning the providers (the network).
APPROACH
The web, like comedy, is inherently social, so we started from a digital perspective, moving it 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. The brand plays a larger role in culture, the arbiter of funny, and that’s what the re-brand needed to communicate. The arbiter of funny was considered for each adaptation of the brand, creating a next generation media brand.
