From razorfish.com: “After a seven-month on-site collaboration, we feel we came up with a new identity for CBC targeted to reflect the priorities and concerns of its viewers — and for inviting participation, critique, and creativity to the collective experience of public television viewing.”

Is it just me or is branding 99% bullshit? I’m, however, quite disappointed in the new CBC look. It looks more like razorfish than CBC. I would much rather see the CBC distinguish itself from the other networks as the people’s own television, rather than struggle to blend in with a ‘totally X-treme’ visual identity.

Who would you trust more, the BBC or the CBC?

Branding is not 99% bullshit, it’s 100% bullshit, particularly coming from CBC PR hacks. And while this new logo (which I quite like aesthetically) purports to unify all of CBC’s various “brands”, it does not as Pete pointed out, cover the website or, as it happens, CBC Radio. As one who works at the CBC, I can tell you that it is a wonderful place to work and still the best broadcaster in Canada. That said, many of the “ground troops” like me are frustrated with upper management that seems to perenially have it’s head wedged up it’s ass.

To the experience of the BBC, style is so fundamental that I can’t consider it to be that most bland and blanding concept of “brand” — even bullshit has value in the garden. “Brand” is really only present where substance and reputation are either absent or consciously being avoided. As the Beeb need not present itself other than it is, the style it chooses is inherently imbued with decades of experience, comfort and certainty. I realized that my BBC (aka “mother”)experience is quite pervasive: BBC shortwave since 1975, web since 1994, BBC world since 2000, BBC Canada since last month. One of my best friends is also a producer with BBC Radio 4’s World at One so I have a snazzy BBC umbrella. CBC lacks that cohesion and authority…I bitch at CBC PEI (TV, radio and web), I ignore CBC web nationally, I bear CBC TV news only grudgingly (the Liberal party organ) and am now even far more selective with my CBC radio listening than I was. [I do love CBC radio Halifax which I can pick up from the Mulgrave transmitter driving in in the morning…no lost dogs, no insecure provincial brag-up]. RealAudio now puts BBC Scotland and NPR at my desk. It is quite comforting to know exactly where the evening traffic jams are near Kilmarnock! So, how will we experience the source of our information? I think our loyalties are going to be defined by content rather than format and style is primarily framed by that content, something to which “brand” is anti-thetical.

This is from the Razorfish site:

“The

So, branding is the vain attempt of an organization devoid of values or with unsavoury values to fill, with artificial values, the void where those missing values should be?

From the Homerpalooza Episode of the Simpsons:

Marge: Am I cool, kids?

Bart+Lisa: No.

Marge: Good. I’m glad. And that’s what makes me cool, not caring, right?

Bart+Lisa: No.

Marge: Well, how the hell do you be cool? I feel like we’ve tried everything here.

Homer: Wait, Marge. Maybe if you’re truly cool, you don’t need to be told you’re cool.

Bart: Well, sure you do.

Lisa: How else would you know?

This reminds me of the recent ‘renewal’ of the New Democratic Party. It seems their research turned up the fact that people want politicians that have actual beliefs of their own and are honest (young people in particular…).

So, of course, they announce their ‘action plan’: Actual beliefs and honesty. Perhaps I’m being redundant here, but there’s no harm in being clear. If people want genuine honesty (which, on my more optimistic days, I presume they do) and you have to ask them to realize that, you’ve already lost.

See Simpsons’ dialog above. Replace Marge & Homer with the NDP and replace Bart & Lisa with the Canadian people.