NBC’s Brand Refresh

For NBC, the new year is bringing a new look.

The company is in the midst of a brand refresh—subtly rolling out a new logo in the fall—and continuing the update with a new studio card/curtain raiser, a.k.a. the brandmark, animation and chimes that kick-off NBC programming. Viewers can see the curtain raiser debut during Miley Cyrus’ New Year’s Eve special on Dec. 31.

“New Year’s Eve felt like the perfect day to do it. We weren’t sure if it was going to be ready. It was all of us biting our nails, getting all of the company and making sure everybody was happy with it and comfortable with it,” Juliet Garrett, svp of creative design for NBC, told Adweek. “And it was just a clear yes. When it’s right, it’s right.”

The brand refresh began at the end of 2021. NBC enlisted the help of four agencies along the way, with Loyalkaspar, Trollback+Company, Red Bee and Sibling Rivalry each contributing different perspectives.

“We knew that we didn’t want to venture far from who we are already. Why would we give up something that’s so valuable as our brand mark and our call letters? We already have those core elements, but how can we bring them into the future? How can we bring them into now?” Garrett said.

The company ultimately partnered with Sibling Rivalry to help bring all the perspectives to life and work on the brand’s scalability for a uniform logo across platforms. The idea was to make the logo impactful at any size.

The new logo, first used in Sunday Night Football in September and in network promos for holiday specials in November, has several changes, including balancing the space between the feathers on NBC’s peacock and removing the white outline.

“The outline made the logo like a sticker, so it sat on top of the content. Now without the outline, it lives and breathes with the content,” Garrett explained. “That’s a really powerful message right now because people can trust that we understand that the content is what they’re watching. They’re not watching the network. They’re watching content. The network offers that shorthand of, ‘You can trust us. You know what we create, and we get you.’”

In addition, the feathers were flattened and aligned with the colors of the dots on the logo for Peacock, NBC’s streaming platform, for consistency across the portfolio. NBC also slightly tinkered with its proprietary font—aptly called NBC Tinker—to increase the weight and finesse of its call letters.

Plus, the beak of the NBC peacock was also extended for legibility.

“That is something that we were like, ‘Oh my gosh. What is this impact going to have? How are we going to update everything we do?’ And it’s funny, I was in the elevator at 30 Rock, and I was looking at the carpet in the elevator, and the beak on the carpets are already extended,” Garrett said. “They were already ahead of us because of the scalability. It made it more flexible so you can see it. They actually had broken the rules with the original logo. This is what people were having to do in all these different outlets so that it would read. So now we’re creating unity.”

Regardless of NBC’s carpets already being on board with the logo changes, Garrett noted that it will still be a “huge shift” to bring uniformity throughout the company. After all, though NBC’s chimes were updated in 2018, the logo wasn’t really touched since 2013.

The studio card was more of a challenge, being the intro to all of NBC’s content and an experience of the brand in three seconds.

“How do you do that in a way that reflects who we are? We want people to feel like when they see it, they hear it; they’re feeling something big is about to happen. Something amazing is about to happen; an NBC show is about to happen,” Garrett said.

The company landed on something in-house that Garrett describes as feeling “very modern” while also having familiarity and comfort.

“It’s almost a ‘less is more,’ and it’s an expression of all of our brand elements all in one place. But in the simplest way that we could make that happen,” Garrett said. “We’re thrilled with where we landed.”

NBC will go through a more widespread transition to the new logo in 2023, timed to the premiere of its midseason programming slate, with news, sports and “everywhere you see the NBC logo” eventually reflecting the changes.

“When we originally approached this project, it was an entertainment exercise, but we quickly saw that this could benefit everybody. So we did a tour around the company, meeting with our different partners and affiliates and talking about, ‘Is this something that you would want to adopt?’ And everybody was incredibly excited,” Garrett said. “For those of us who’ve worked on many rebrands, these things never go that easily. And it went so easily. Everybody was just enthusiastically on board.”