Check out the new article on us in the latest Promax Brief Magazine featuring the recent rebrand we did for TVOKids:
BLUEPRINTS: TVOKIDS
Trace Pictures, fresh off their rebrand work for PBS Kids Sprout, recently updated Canada’s TVOKids to give the publicly funded channel a look that reflects their mandate to be an educational resource for children and their parents.
Justin Stephenson, senior creative director of Trace Pictures, explained that TVOKids has a very educational and curriculum.driven approach to children’s programming that they wanted to come across.
‘We essentially needed to create a series of interlinking brand stories between the preschool block, the school, age block, TV0Parents and the TVOKids umbrella brand,” he said.
Trisha Emerson, Trace Pictures’ executive producer said that since TVOKids has two major programming blocks, they’re going after a wider range of ages that each mandate a different approach. To rebrand both programming blocks as well as TVOKids overall, Emerson said that it was almost like three rebrands, which had to be completed in about 10 weeks.
To do this, Trace Pictures worked with TVOKids to create a 3D, character-based identity package. Since TVOKids’ goal is to inspire young audiences to not just interact with the screen, but with their families and to prepare them for real-world activities, Stephenson said working with TVOKids was a fresh challenge. “Their concerns were very different than commercial TV concerns,” Stephenson said. “They wanted to emphasize the civic mindedness of the channel.”
Emerson said that since TV channels are not only competing with other channels, but also with interactive activity, TVOKids sees their website as an important extension of their on-air brand. TVOKids is currently reworking their website using a branding tool kit provided by Trace Pictures. Having recently worked with Cartoon Network, Nickelodeon and PBS Kids Sprout, Stephenson said he’s seen a slight shift in what channels are looking Is convey to their audiences.
“I feel like there’s a greater emphasis on interaction with kids and their parents right now,” Stephenson said. “It might be a re. sponse to interactive tech-nology and shifting more toward people being more involved in their entertain, ment in a way.”