Well, I suppose that’s not entirely true, because I made my living, and hundreds of millions for my employers, doing it for longer than you can imagine. It’s the word I hate, even though it was introduced to the media biz by one of my colleagues*. But as soon as we’d made the word au courant and it became overused and misunderstood I found the entire process so debiliating I quit the biz to become a producer of cartoons.

I got into the cable business on May 5, 1980, as Bob Pittman’s first hire for what would become MTV Networks, minutes before cable became hotter than a pistol, the Web 1.0 of the TV generation. At that point the average American home had three channels of television (!) and each of them was identified soley as “Channel 2″ (or 3, or 4 or 11, whatever), and they all ran every kind of program. Different shows from their competitors to be sure, but all in all it was the same thing whichever channel you watch. The “on-air” look came from a design company with music from a jingle house, and it all looked and sounded the same.

Bob and I came out of radio, which had made the transition from being the mainstream medium for all of America to being targeted. Rock ‘N’ Roll for the “teenagers,” talk and news for their parents, jazz-classical-ethnic music where it was appropriate. And each station in every town (thousands in all) had a clear and distinct 24 hour “identity” defined by their content, DJs, jingles, even their advertisers. We thought since cable TV which would explode the average household offerings (accurate projections said 30 channels by 1987, 100 by 1999) we could apply the same identity structures to television for the first time and command loyalty from our audiences and premiums from our advertisers.

First MTV: Music Television, then Nickelodeon proved us right. And Pandora came out of the box. My partner Alan Goodman and I became the first senior managers to leave MTV under our own steam (they hired us back as consultants within days) and set up the first company in America to create “identities” for television networks. By the time we named it branding we’d spawned competitors everywhere and bored ourselves into retirement. So I thought.

Is this all useful in the YouTube age? Probably. People need to believe in things and “brands” give them a reason to believe. Whether it’s an attitude they agree with or content they can depend on viewers (users, consumers, customers) go most often to the places they can count on (and then, of course, adverisers follow, in droves). We all want our favorites. No technology solution will discourage us.

*The consulting firm I started with Alan Goodman made it’s bones by creating “identities” for television networks –”we make your logo the star” is how we put it. After some stunning, and unexpected, successes with MTV, Nickelodeon, and Nick-at-Nite, we hired SeriousEats.com proprietor Ed Levine as an account executive straight from a frustrating experience at giant ad agency J. Walter Thompson. After we gave him our company’s strategic download Ed said, “Oh, you mean you guys create brands! In package goods we call it “branding.” If you say so Ed. Alan and I thought it made our work sound cool so we started using the word in pitch meetings. Soon enough trade like Ad Age and MultiChannel News were referring to the MTV Networks special sauce as “branding.” Our hell was created.

Please promulgate us on the interweb.

Posted by Fred at 8:39 pm on Monday, February 19th, 2007 in Branding, Media. You can follow responses through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.