ITV2's Badly Behaving Ident System

03.02.2016

Courting young viewers is a tough proposition for broadcasters this day and age, mostly because those troublesome youths care little about ingesting their content by traditional means.Â

"Young people consume television in short bites, as a feed," said Tony Pipes, executive creative director for ITV Creative, the in-house marketing agency for UK networks ITV and ITV2. "They watch it online. They watch it wherever they can, really."

You might even say these stubbornly progressive whippersnappers are "quite badly behaved," Pipes said, in that their free-for-all approach breaks all the rules we've come to associate with linear viewing. Which is why, when ITV Creative rebranded naughtier, more youthful sibling ITV2 last summer, it opted to inject some bad behavior into not only the design elements of the channel, but into its very infrastructure.

"TV has worked in the same way for many, many years," Pipes said: "'We're going to deliver six idents, have menus, have the same junctions going into the programs, etc.' But the more research we did with the audience we were trying to capture, it was all about trying to break that up. They didn't want traditional continuity or idents or any of that stuff. So, we instituted an ident system that is ever-changing."

Collaborating with London-based design and motion studio ManvsMachine, ITV2 launched its new ident system last August, a series of 10 bold, vibrant, impeccably-designed 20-second spots that no viewer of ITV2 will ever see the same way twice. That's because, in sync with creating the content itself, ITV2 engineered an automated play-out system on the backend that "via some clever java scripting," said ManvsMachine Creative Director Mike Alderson, "just grabs bits and bobs of them, and it's totally out of human control at that point… We've removed all control from the editing process."

With five more idents released last month, there are now more than 300,000 possible ident configurations that could play across the ITV2 airwaves, as the new system continuously generates randomly assembled spots culled from the 15 core originals.Â

"It could just play two clips over 20 seconds one time, or you get 10 seconds of one and 10 seconds of another, or 22 clips all rapidly put together at one second each," said Alderson. Clips might even play in reverse.Â

"There are sort of no rules," he continued.

An in-house broadcast graphics consultant at ITV named Simon Davis headed up the technical side of the ident system, building out the randomizing process in a graphics program called Clarity. The current batch of 15 core idents now sit in a digital bin, where they can be prioritized on a numerical scale so that the system is more likely to grab and dice up one than another. The content can be re-prioritized at any time, and switched in and out of the bin at will, opening up some seriously cool possibilities in terms of seasonal and specific programming campaigns.Â

"It's an open-ended brand system," said Alderson. "It could look totally different in five years because all these [idents] have been changed and updated… You can really play with the viewer and create a spontaneity that people start to semi-expect and look for."

To cite one example of the possibilities therein, ITV2 recently acquired the rights to popular American animated series Family Guy, for which it could, were it so inclined, commission a few more Family Guy-specific core idents then feed them into the system. The system would then throw randomly selected chunks from those Family Guy spots into the mix, peppering its already unpredictable channel idents with unpredictable bits and pieces from the show idents. The element of surprise might or might not be more effective than just another run-of-the-mill Family Guy promo, but at the very least its anarchic quality seems to fit perfectly into the tone of the series. Not all programs would benefit from such randomization (which, as evidenced in the clips above, can be jarring at times, which is kind of the point), but Family Guy feels like one of them.Â

"It's a slightly more interesting way of infiltrating the channel without losing the brand," Alderson said.

For now, though, the graphics currently populating the system are grounded solely in an aesthetic that is "tactile and well-finished, high-end stuff," Alderson said, "but we also wanted to have that playfulness." ManvsMachine's internal term for the core idents is "twosomes," which plays off of the ITV2 moniker while also literally describing the mashing of two objects that occurs in every spot. The object pairings were carefully chosen so that each one expresses an appropriately cheeky visual joke that can be elucidated if you take the time to figure it out. An ident depicting crackers smashing into cups of tea, for instance, is a "slam dunk," while an ident full of fans and fluttering neckties is a "blow job."

Of course, most viewers don't scrutinize an on-air brand heavily enough to even detect hidden puzzles, let alone solve them, and that's just fine with Alderson.Â

"If the viewer wants to delve in and get the gags and the metaphors and realize it all auto-generates so they never quite see the same ident twice ever, that's all good," he said. "But at the end of the day, if someone doesn't want to give a crap about that stuff, they just feel like they've seen something that's every-day life, amplified."

Youth television, Pipes added, "can go really trashy quite easily and go really throw-away. That was something we really wanted to avoid. We wanted something that was quality and had longevity and that was beautiful… It was a natural place to go, really. You have the best of both worlds - chaos, but within that, this beauty as well."

CREDITS

Client: ITV

Creative Concept / Design / Direction: ManvsMachine

DoP: Pau Castejon Ubeda

Art Department: Simon Davis

Audio: David Kamp @ Studio Kamp

Editor: Nick Armstrong @ Envy Post

Colourist: Aubrey Woodiwiss @ Electric Theatre Collective [Images courtesy of ManvsMachine.]