Networks rebrand hoping to re-energize

Twenty-five years ago, MTV was best known for music videos starring Michael Jackson and Madonna.

These days, its reigning queen is not a recording star at all but rather Nicole “Snooki” Polizzi, the rowdy party girl from the reality series “Jersey Shore.”

So maybe it’s not surprising that last week the 29-year-old network bowed to the inevitable and finally scraped the legend “Music Television” off its corporate logo.

It was a belated acknowledgment of what has been obvious for years: MTV has evolved into a reality channel that occasionally runs programs that have to do with music.

But the shift is significant because, in an era of rapid technological change and microscopic attention spans, how networks identify themselves matters more than ever, experts say.

MTV “realized being ‘music television’ was too limiting,” says Dave Howe, president of Syfy, home of such series as “Stargate Universe” and the now-defunct “Battlestar Galactica.”

Howe says the right brand is essential “to cut through the noise and clutter of the media explosion” bedeviling the TV industry.

And he should know. Last summer, his network underwent a controversial name change from the Sci-Fi Channel to Syfy, a made-up word that Twitter users said looked more like the name of a mop or a gossip magazine than that of a cable network.

One newspaper called it the “dumbest rebranding ever.” But Howe says it has re-energized the network and sharpened its identity.

Because it referred to a well-established genre, “sci-fi” could not be trademark-protected – an important consideration for a network looking to establish a distinctive identity. Also, Howe says, it evoked images of “space, aliens and the future,” turning off some viewers and advertisers.

“We totally expected there to be a backlash from core sci-fi fans,” Howe says. But he adds that the move has “far exceeded our expectations . … It’s opened up the network to a broader range of viewers.”

Other networks have gone much further. In 2003, Viacom rebranded the New TNN, which itself rose from the ashes of the Nashville Network, as Spike TV, a network targeted aggressively at males. (It’s now simply called Spike.)

The Learning Channel was originally an outpost for little-watched educational fare; as TLC, it booted the explicit reference to self-improvement and achieved household recognition as the purveyor of the pop-culture smash “Jon & Kate Plus 8.”

Often, outlets extensively overhaul programming – and chase higher ratings – without changing their names at all.

Over the years, Bravo has moved away from foreign and art movies and reinvented itself as an outpost of such hip reality shows as “Queer Eye” and “Top Chef.”

A&E’s now-defunct fine-arts shows, such as “Breakfast With the Arts,” are a far cry from “Gene Simmons Family Jewels” and the other decidedly un-artsy reality shows that now rule the channel.

Howe says the generic names – Music Television, Sci-Fi, Arts & Entertainment – date from the dawn of multi-channel television, when it was enough to tell viewers you were offering a certain type of programming.

That approach poses problems in today’s teeming media market.

“It’s too old-fashioned,” he says. “You might as well be called Milk or Gas.”

But other analysts wonder whether such marketing concepts will matter in what might be shaping up as a post-network age.

Kathy Sharpe, chief executive of New York-based marketing firm Sharpe Partners, notes that whatever its name or logo, MTV might not have the centrality in young people’s lives that it once did.

“MTV isn’t really competing with VH1 or Fuse,” she says. “It’s competing with Facebook and YouTube.”