Branding: Keeping viewers glued to your channel

 

 

 

 

 

 

Branding plays a key role in establishing a channel on a television grid, Internet, tablet, computer or smartphone as a source of content.

Branding elements in a channel broadcast are audience-retention tools. From a simple channel logo to more targeted messages, social media and more, whether these elements are presented as in-program promotions or as interstitial elements, their purpose is to keep viewers informed of content and glued to the channel for as long as possible.

Branding also expresses a channel’s personality and identity. Creative teams are constantly being challenged by marketing and media departments to build more advanced graphics that represent the brand.

So the question is: How do you create more graphics content, across more output media, and keep it up to date with a fluid show schedule? The answer is through advanced branding workflows.

A variety of approaches

There is a straightforward choice for the production of each branding graphic. Is the graphic element one that can be pre-produced and played out as a clip? Or is it fed by real-time data that is only available at the last second, thus requiring being fed to a real-time branding device for
live rendering?

The availability of branding information will fall somewhere between well-in-advance (weeks to months) and very last second. In the case of high-profile content, such as major sporting events, feature films or show premieres, the date and time of the broadcast is fixed well in advance and will not change. These are premium events that will be heavily promoted and play a big role in branding.

Dynamic content would include live news, sports, weather and financial data, or interactive data driven by social media. Dynamic information such as this is sometimes not available, or can often change, right up to the last moment, requiring real-time insertion.

Because most content lives somewhere between well-in-advance and last-second, the question is: Usually how long in advance is the information known? A week? A day? An hour? Seconds? The answer helps to determine which workflow makes sense, but it’s important to remember that the answer may not be the same for each branding element.