From worst to first: Nickelodeon Network IDs 1984-1992

See more of our Nickelodeon posts here.

Fred/Alan started with working with Nickelodeon in late 1984 when Bob Pittman was made President of MTV Networks and he fired the existing staff, which had succeeded in losing the company tens of millions of dollars, and worse, making Nickelodeon the lowest rated cable network in America.

Bob assigned us to the remaining executives, Gerry Laybourne and Debby Beece, and suggested to them the Fred/Alan approach to branding could help them succeed. We immediately introduced them to our notion of network “promises” and then redesigned the network with Tom Corey and Scott Nash (Corey McPherson Nash, Boston) and hired some of our favorite writers and producers to create a ‘brand’. There was no money for programming or advertisting, so all the work needed to be done by the airtime on the channel itself. Nonetheless, our efforts succeeded in bringing Nickelodeon from worst to first in the ratings within six months, and Nickelodeon remains America’s #1 cable network of any kind, earning billions of dollars and making millions of kids happy.

The first ‘oldies’ television station: TV Heaven Channel 41 Station IDs 1988

Fred/Alan IDs 1989 for TV Heaven 41 from fredseibert on Vimeo.

In 1988, a friend of ours bought a couple of failing UHF TV stations in the upper suburbs of Minnesota. He asked Fred/Alan to work our branding and programming philosphies on the station (linked together with common programming). We made them the first broadcaster* to use an “oldies television” approach and creative director Noel Frankel, dubbed it “TV Heaven.”

For the animated IDs we felt were so integral to branding TV in the 1980s, our producer Tom Pomposello convinced us that the pioneering work of animator Fred Mogubgub would be just the original ticket. Fred’s style had a kind of staccato, pop-art feel, and he’d made an animated film completely out of still images illustrating the text. We hired Fred, Marv Newland’s International Rocketship (Vancouver), and various illustrators and photographers. For text we researched enormous amounts of quotations with the word ‘heaven’ in them. Like “Heaven is on Earth when I look at you, but when I see you in a mirror it’s reversed.” We chose a few dozen and had them read or sung by actors like Fran Rizzo or Dr. John**, put the results together, and had a campaign that was one of our proudest accomplishments.

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* Note our post title says “station” not “network.” Alan and I had created the first oldies TV approach for an ABC development deal we had in 1983. After they passed we held onto the idea and reworked in 1985 it when Nickelodeon needed to fill their non-kid hours from 8pm-6am. Immediately, ‘Nick-at-Nite’ became #1 in cable prime with the highly coveted (among programmers and advertisers) group of adults from 18 to 34 years old.

By 1988, the geniuses in the MTV Networks sales department decided that oldies programming (Bewitched, My Three Sons, The Donna Reed Show, and the rest) in black & white couldn’t be sold to advertisers, and the publicity folks insisted the TV writers didn’t want to write about “old shows”. At the time, no one there understood it was the format that innovative and it was the format the audience was in love with. They demanded Nick-at-Nite “reposition” itself. We suggested an all comedy network, since the most successful shows on the network were old sitcoms, and for nine months we preceeded HA!, Comedy Channel, and Comedy Central.

The Nickelodeon folks gave us permission to bring the format to the tiny, tiny TV stations in Minnesota; how much trouble would that cause a big, ole cable network?

Within three weeks of launch TV Heaven had generated more publicity than Nick-at-Nite had in three years. Our marketing client told us we would not only be fired from Nick-at-Nite but from all Nick related channels, maybe even MTV. We resigned TV Heaven and they never paid their bills to Fred/Alan.

The first cable TV brand: MTV: Music Television Network IDs 1981-1983

MTV IDs 1981-1983 from on Vimeo.

MTV’s network identity wasn’t a Fred/Alan project, but it might as well have been, since Fred and Alan began their professional television collaboration there.

(There’s more about the MTV logo on Fred’s personal site here.)

Fred Seibert began working as virtually the first employee of MTV: Music Television in May 1980 (under programming head Bob Pittman). He quickly recruited his radio colleague Alan Goodman to help lead the strategic efforts to create a network promotional strategy. Pittman first raised the idea of animated IDs as the equivalent of radio jingles; Fred and Alan upped the ante by thinking of them as the video generation’s ‘album covers,’ the visual touchstones of their cultural life.

Frank Olinsky was Fred’s childhood friend. His tiny design firm, Manhattan Design, was chosen over giant international to create the iconic trademark. And in quick succession, we enlisted virtually unknown independent animators to create the network identifications. Colossal Pictures in San Francisco, Broadcast Arts in Washington DC, and Buzzco in New York were the first creative teams.

Within days of the network launch on August 1, 1981, the rapidly morphing, indelible logo was a fixture of the popular culture, and a revolution in media branding had begun its run.

The true creative breakthrough came when we stared at the dozens of Manhattan Design’s color take-outs on their amazing logo; we had to figure out the standard, fixed logo we thought was de rigeur for a ‘famous’ trademark. Frank Olinsky felt differently and thought every show on MTV should have its own logo, and supplied his takes on what they could be. The problem was that MTV: Music Television wasn’t going to have any shows, just a continuous wheel of hundreds and thousands of music videos in a row.

After weeks of delirium filled sessions of staring at all the cool designs they’d provided us we realized the solution would be to use all of them. Right, we could use all of the logos, and more, all the time in every piece of animation and promotion. Using them all at once would provide a frentic pace and color hysteria that we thought would be a perfect metaphor for pop music.

Guess we were lucky enough to be right.

Inventing TV ‘brands’: Fred/Alan Network IDs 1980-1992 

From the very first minute I went to work for Bob Pittman (he was 25, I was 27) at the Warner-Amex Satellite Entertainment Company in May of 1980, he told me about the company’s plan for a television channel that would be exclusively rock videos and how he envisioned the TV equivalent of radio jingles: network identifications (‘IDs’) short, wacked out pieces of animation that would reveal the network logo. Not like the staid CBS Eye (“You’re watching CBS.”) but rock’n’roll wrapped up into a little picture explosion.

As soon as we started working on what would become MTV: Music Television a month later I started thinking about these IDs and realized they could be the album covers of the new generation of music fans. For baby boomers the album cover came of age with the first American Beatles album representing every phase of their cultural development. I had bemoaned my lateness to that party, but my self-importance hoped the MTV network IDs could serve the same purpose.

Little did I know they’d achieve an almost equal prominence, and more. For me and Alan Goodman, my first partner in the enterprise (and countless more), they led the way for how we would become the first people to ‘brand’ American cable television networks throughout the 1980s. First as employees at MTV, then for our clients at Fred/Alan, we made over 1000 more of these 10-second visual operas for networks ranging from Nickelodeon and Comedy Central to TMTV in Japan and Lifetime. We worked with some of the greatest indie animators the world had to offer (some we’re still doing projects with today) and started a lot of companies on their way. These IDs might have been the most fun I had during the years we were doing television branding. (And for me, inadvertendly, they began what was to become a late life career change into producing cartoons.)

-Fred Seibert, 2006