Lifetime tries ‘Talk Television,’ 1984.

Lifetime IDs 1985 for Fred/Alan from fredseibert on Vimeo.

Tom Burchill had a good idea in 1984. Lifetime (the result of a merger between Cable Health Network and Daytime Television) would become “Talk Television”, the TV euqivalent of talk radio. The hosts would be everyone from Regis Philbin to Dr. Ruth. Good idea, poor execution, run by the wrong executives, who were still trying to make broadcast television, when cable had clearly morphed into something different. And even talk radio hadn’t yet supercharged into the conservative powerhouse Rush Limbaugh initiated in 1988.

But I enjoyed the work we did. Lifetime was our first Fred/Alan branded network after Nickelodeon, and the IDs were done with Corey McPherson Nash, Buzzco, Colossal Pictures, Olive Jar Productions. Tom Pomposello produced, and that’s Tina Potter as “the annoucer.”

(Tom Burchill recovered, I should hasten to add, when he dumped the talk format and Lifetime became the very successful “Television for Women.” We, alas, were not involved.)

Animation by Colossal Pictures, Buzzco Associates, Charlex, Olive Jar Studios, Filigree Films. 
Lifetime logo designed by Tom Corey & Scott Nash, Corey McPherson Nash, Boston, Mass, USA

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.

Nickelodeon goes to sleepaway camp, 1988-1990.

Nickelodeon Camp IDs 1988-1990 from fredseibert on Vimeo.

Howard Hoffman is an artist and animation director who’d worked with Fred/Alan on a number of projects. One day he presented a zany idea. Howard spent Augusts at the Maine summer camp of his youth running an animation workshop, and wouldn’t it be better if the kids were animating something “real” like some Nickelodeon network IDs? That could be cool, right?

Well, sure. How bad could they be?

Not bad at all, it turned out; they were great. Howard made Nick IDs (and we filmed the kids introducing their shorts) for several years, and they were some of the best pieces we ever ran on the network.

Quick, kill Turner. VH-1: Video Hits One, 1985.

VH-1: Video Hits One IDs 1985 from fredseibert on Vimeo.

The whole story of VH-1 is probably only interesting to those who lived it, given how non-interesting the network has been for most of it’s life, and we were involved from the beginning for almost 15 years. While Fred and Alan had left MTV 18 months before, they were still considered a vital part of the brain trust that could help launch networks at the company. Here’s a few notes on the network identity/branding work we did the first time out. In 1985.

Origin: Ted Turner decided that MTV played devil’s music (hey, Ted was little skewed in those days) and was going to launch an “acceptable” alternative. MTV Networks wasn’t going to lose the goose that laid the golden egg and decided to fight Ted playing his own game. (In 1982, when ABC annouced a competing cable news service, Turner put CNN2, now Headline News, on the air within weeks and crushed ABC.) We strategized and executed the company’s second music network within weeks.

The name: Our boss, programming head Bob Pittman, was annoyed that his team rejected his pet name for MTV, TV-1, on the grounds that no one had a “1” on their TVs (remember, in 1981, people still had TV dials that went from channel 2 to channel 13). By 1985 he was powerful enough that the new music channel became, by his decree, VH-1: Video Hits One.

The programming: The programming needed to be available, inexpensive, and seemingly popular. Oh, and it couldn’t “cannibalize” MTV’s viewers. So, it would be poisitioned as music video for an older group (MTV was for folks 12 to 34 years old), 25 to 49 years old. Less rock and more pop. In reality, it meant any darn music videos MTV wouldn’t touch.

The logo & network IDs: My mentor Dale Pon and his partner, ad legend George Lois, had done the iconic “I Want My MTV” advertising, so George was asked to design the logo. Having not one pop music vein in his body, we got what we got.

Fred/Alan gathered up our most reliable animation collaborators, and churned out as many IDs as we could in four weeks (not easy with traditional cell animation and 1980s motion graphics). IDs that wouldn’t seem like they “belonged” on MTV. In other words, have fun, but not too much fun. As you can hear on the last pieces, it was the beginning of our Top 40 radio jingles era.

Animation by Buzzco & Colossal Pictures. Jingles by JAM. Logo by George Lois.

The doo-wopping of television, 1984-1992.

See more of our Nickelodeon posts here.

The Jive 5 on Nickeldeon from fredseibert on Vimeo

Eugene Pitt and The Jive 5 were as perfect an element of network identity as Fred/Alan ever found. All the filmmakers who worked with us on Nickelodeon lined up to be the first to use their soundtracks on their network IDs.

The Fred/Alan television branding execution often started with defining a network’s sound. A background in music and radio made this logical for them, though it was a philosphy grounded in their belief that TV was driven by the sounds first, with the visuals often following the audio lead. In the case of the Nickelodeon rebranding in 1985 the time frame was short, under six months, so the audio and the visual identities were developed simultaneously.

For over a year Alan and Fred had been thinking about old radio jingles, and thinking of ways to incorporate a human, vocal sound on their identities. In 1983, working on The Playboy Channel’s Hot Rocks, they scouted around for an a cappella group to record distinctive IDs for the music video show. Alan’s former colleague, writer and producer Marty Pekar, had started Ambient Sound to capture contemporary recordings of classic doo-wop groups from the 50s and 60s. He introduced them to the leader of The Jive 5, Eugene Pitt, as “not only a great singer, but a smart man.” They found Eugene to be, as Rock and Roll Hall of Fame CEO Terry Stewart said, “the most underrated soul singer in America,” and a wonderful collaborator. When the opportunity to work with Nickelodeon presented itself, Fred, Alan, and producer Tom Pomposello immediately knew the Jive 5 would be the perfect underpinning for defining the vocabulary of the network.

Convincing Nickelodeon was another story. When we brought up the notion of a sound identity, Nickelodeon executives, still not fully understanding of where we intended to steer the channel, suggested a consideration of Raffi, then a recent phenomenon as a singer for young children. “He’s very popular; our research confirms it.” Fred/Alan tried a lot of arguments to bring them around to a doo-wop sound, but they fell on deaf ears. “Doo-wop’s 30 years old, no kid has ever heard of it.”

Frame grab from “The Jive Five”, by Jon Kane/Optic Nerve

We won the day on two grounds.

Fred played on the executives’ liberal backgrouds. “We love all forms of African-American music, and using doo-wop will be a great way to educate American kids without anyone being the wiser.”

Alan’s worked even better. He opened his mouth and, quoting The Marcels’ arrangement of chestnut “Blue Moon,” sang:

“Bom-ma-bom, a-bom-bom-a-bom, ba-ba-bom-bom-a-bomp, b-dang-a-dang-dang, b-ding-a-dong-ding.”

“What kid isn’t going to relate to that right away?” Alan asked.

Case closed.

Animation by Eli Noyes & Kit Laybourne, Joey Ahlbum, Colossal Pictures, David Lubell, Jerry Lieberman & Kim Deitch, Marv Newland/International Rocketship, and Jon Kane/Optic Nerve. Additional singing by Juli Davidson, and Paul Rolnick.

The Nickelodeon logo, designed by Tom Corey & Scott Nash

See more of our Nickelodeon posts here.

Nickelodeon Logo Logic   Designed by Sheri Dorr & Laurie Kelliher   Creative Director: Scott Webb

Tom Corey, Scott Nash, and Alan Goodman are the key guys in the Nickelodeon logo saga.

Back in the day my partner Alan Goodman and I were known as the logo guys. It was both flattering and annoying, because we’re not designers and it deflected attention from the brilliant people we worked with often, like Manhattan Design (Frank Olinsky, Pat Gorman, and Patti Rogoff designed MTV’s logo) and Corey & Co. (who designed Nickelodeon’s). But after we became known as the group who developed (not designed) the MTV logo, our reps were set in stone for a while. Eventually we were able to morph it into the idea of developing media brands, which more accurately reflected how Alan and I thought of ourselves.

After setting the vocabulary (more important than design in many ways) and “look” of MTV Alan and I left MTV Networks to set up our independent Fred/Alan Inc. and our first client was… MTV Networks. By 1984, the five year old Nickelodeon was in trouble, having lost an accumulated $40 million (that’s in 1980’s money, like $200 million today) and worse, it was the absolute lowest rated cable network in America. Dead last. MTVN chief Bob Pittman asked Alan and I to help. It was a tough decision for us to make since we were broke but had no interest in children’s television or the people who worked in it. The ‘broke’ part won out.

The key decisions we made:

• Keep the name “Nickelodeon.” We figured that 10,000,000 kids (there current circulation) knew the name and what it stood for. Management wanted to switch to “Nick,” since it was easier to spell and say; let’s forget that everyone outside the company would wonder why they were named after a garage mechanic. There were a lot of reasons for killing it: no one under a certain age had ever heard of a nickelodeon, and those who had knew it had nothing whatsoever to do with children; the word was hard to spell correctly in the age of pre-Google and spellcheck; and, the word was way too long and thin to dominate a television screen.

• Treat the network like an exclusive club, where only kids could join, not like a TV station with all kids shows. Kids in June of 1984 (when we started work) needed something they could call their own. They felt on the rear end of life, they told us so constantly. Adults (parents and teachers) made all the decisions for them. TV in the 80s wasn’t for them. They were scared of getting older, but their unconscious biology kept egging them on to age faster.

• Ban the word “FUN” from the Nickelodeon vocabulary. Every network promo told the kids that Nickelodeon was fun. It wasn’t. We thought it was better to be “fun” than say “fun.”

• Redesign the logo. Famous television designer, a moonlighting Lou Dorfsman, had designed the logo in 1981, and our brilliant friend Bob Klein had added a silver ball that zoomed around the screen in and out of everything a kid might find exciting.

Alan and I didn’t find it exciting. We’d been working a lot with a new friend, Tom Corey, who owned Corey & Co. (tragically, Tom’s passed away, his companies are now called Corey McPherson Nash & Big Blue Dot) in Boston. He came down to the Fred/Alan office in New York with his partner Scott Nash and heard our pitch for the network. we told them about our decisions I talked about above, and told them while we didn’t know anything about kids’ programming we knew that the offices of Nickelodeon were as quiet as a chapel (as one of the internal wags put it) and that in order to spice the place up we hoped that when our jobs were done they’d all be shooting spitballs at each other. Tom and Scott dug in eagerly.

I wish I had their presentation. It was pretty informal —a bunch of logos sketched on a page— and none any of us were all that crazy about. Eventually, we settled on one that was 3D in nature that revolved around itself, and kind of a standard designer treatment of a trademark. We were about to settle when Alan spoke up and said he didn’t think it was in keeping with our reputation as moving image thinkers about logos.

The MTV logo had been sold in with two thoughts. 1) Rock’N’Roll was a dynamic constantly changing medium and a logo should have a built in updating mechanism. And 2) More importantly, television was moving pictures. Logos were generally designed by print designers who wanted a perfect image, then handed off to moving image designers who had to figure out how to make the damn thing move. Often, it ended up with a big hunk of metal hurtling through space, cause what else were they going to do? We’d argued that in the 1980s that was a dumb thing to do. Why not just design a logo with movement baked into the conceptual frame right from the beginning? TV was the most important place to see the logo, and print designers could just *STOP* the motion and pick an image for an ad; it would be more dynamic even in the print that way.

Alan pointed out that’s how we’d made our bones, and besides were right, darn it. Movement was the way to go, constant change made for a energetic network, and kids were the most vital force in the world. Give them something they relate to: change. He was looking at the orange splat on their page. Tom and Scott argued that orange generally clashed with everything and that would make the logo stand out (as long as we didn’t let designers try and make it work “correctly.”) The splat could morph into any image we liked. And it wasn’t the MTV version of change. I came along for the ride that Tom, Scott, and Alan were proposing, and we trucked over to Bob Pittman’s and Gerry Laybourne’s office to make the pitch.

Bob and Gerry didn’t buy it. No one else there did either. “It doesn’t match anything.” “It’s flat.” “It’s not as cool as the MTV logo, what happened to you guys?”

Ultimately, we prevailed. I’m not really sure how, since all their objections were right on. But we were the “logo guys,” so they eventually bought our action. I’m thrilled they did, since our work with Nickelodeon is some of my favorite stuff in our careers. Tom and Scott went on to be among the premiere designers in television and kids (Scott’s now one of the leading children’s book authors and illustrators), Alan’s a successful producer and brand strategist (still consulting Nickelodeon), and they all deserved the accolades the world could throw at them.

(By the way, the book Nickelodeon Logo Logic was put together in 1998 by Sheri Dorr and Laurie Kelliher at their in-house creative services department after Alan and I had stopped full time consulting to the company six years before. The company had expanded so dramatically and so many people had trademark needs that without us —the “logo police”— around Nick’s Worldwide Creative Director Scott Webb needed some objective rules set down for designers and marketers to follow. I’m not so sure we’d agree with all their points but a trademark is a dynamic thing. Different people interpret it different ways, kind of like a musical composition, and it’s natural it’ll be looked at in new ways over the years.)

Update, 2010:

• Nickelodeon discontinued use of this logo after 26 years. They call it a “rebranding.” We would probably beg to differ.

• On his website, advertising executive George Lois claims to have designed the Nickelodeon logo. Since Fred/Alan developed the logo directly with Tom Corey and Scott Nash, his assertion is clearly false.

—Fred Seibert, 2009

Fred/Alan plays with Nickelodeon.

Fred/Alan worked with Nickelodeon from 1984 through 1992 as brand, marketing, and programming consultants, as their advertising agency, and through it’s Chauncey Street Productions subsidiary (managing director: Albie Hecht), as television producers.

Alan has continued to consult and produce for Nickelodeon. Fred produces cartoons and consults for the network. Albie became Nick’s President of TV & FIlm Production for many years and now produces TV shows for them too.

N’awlins and Minnesota?

Fred/Alan IDs 1989 featuring Dr. John for TV Heaven from fredseibert on Vimeo.

After Tom Pomposello introduced us to Fred Mogubgub’s pop-art style for the TV Heaven/Channel 41 station IDs, our creative department researched a series of ‘heaven’ quotations which would be read by actors for the animation soundtracks.

In another life Fred/Alan Managing Director Ed Levine (now a famous food writer) had co-produced two amazing records by New Orleans stylist Dr. John (real name Mac Rebennack) and had convinced him to play our annual holiday parties.  Ed reminded us Mac was singing commercials (for their big payday) and thought he might do us a favor and put one of the appropriate quotes to music to give the campaign a little flavor.

Session arrangements were made and Ed and our production team went over to the studio for what we thought we be a normal three hour session with Mac singing and playing solo piano. A little over an hour later they were back in the office doors. We were shocked and concerned they were back so fast; what had gone wrong?!

As often happens with magic talent at the right moment, nothing had gone wrong and everything had gone amazingly right. Mac had taken a look at the lyrics we’d prepared, with the syllables’ rhythm worked out perfectly, and come up with a melody that fit 10 seconds in about…10 seconds! He’d asked for other lyrics and we put everything we had in front of him whether they “worked” or not. One by one, with over a dozen set of lyrics, Mac ran them down in real time, and before our team knew it, he’d sung every word we had. All of a sudden we’d almost doubled our ID output, and with a N’awlins joie de vivre at that.

We eventually used visuals from all of our contributors — Fred Mogubgub, International Rocketship, Mark Karzen, Mark Beyer, and others from our agency creative team— with the unique soundtracks Dr. John provided us.

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.

……….

* 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.