Television and cable networks deploy branding (NBC’s “peacock” in the 1960s), rebranding (NBC’s “must see TV” in the 1990s and early 2000s), and co-branding (NBC and Microsoft’s current cable news network MSNBC) strategies to differentiate their programming fare from competitors. Television/cable branding typically includes three components (Mullen, Turow): (1) the consistent use of logos and other onscreen components, (2) signature shows, and (3) “compatible” reruns. The programming and marketing departments of cable and television networks today typically have formal branding policies and preferences in each of these three areas. But this was not always the case. In stark contrast to the early years of television, for example, a far greater share of the average programming hour today is comprised of “self-promotions” produced and aired by the network or channel brand. This increasing promotional reflexivity is partly due to broad-based efforts to raise a network’s programming above the clutter, and partly due to a fundamental shift in the ways that brands were talked about in relation to television.

During the postwar era, marketing departments and ad agencies spent considerable energy designing, developing, and promoting brands for their clients, who were mostly large manufacturers (Procter and Gamble, Colgate-Palmolive, Goodyear, GM, and other Fortune 500 companies) that successfully promoted their products by advertising on network television. In a few cases, such as DuMont, companies operated both as manufactured brands (of television sets) and as broadcasters (of programs), but this soon changed. The television networks that survived and prospered during this period, on the other hand (NBC, CBS, ABC), did so in part by promoting themselves to governmental policy-makers and audiences not as manufacturers of proprietary, branded consumer products, but as enlightened stewards and caretakers of the airwaves. This successful promotion of the networks as trustees (rather than brands) protecting a vast public resource, helped legitimize and sanction a network “oligarchy” during the 1950s (one controlled by only three corporations who were referred to officially in abbreviated three-initial short-hand). But even as caretakers of the public trust, the same networks were always producers of content as well, and any time this reality surfaced in public discussions, tensions emerged among policymakers and industry management. These tensions typically resulted in the application of constraints to the television industry (such as limitations on syndication rights allowed the networks when they acted as producers). Such constraints were intended to ensure the free and open flow of trade and speech on the airwaves. But this situation slowly changed, as the major television networks (and then the federal government starting in the Reagan era) began to acknowledge the original networks less as public trustees than as corporations (and the branded manufacturers of content) fighting for market share. Early on the networks exploited one side of their dualistic identity (lobbying for trusteeship with regulators), even though they effectively and simultaneously sold themselves to viewers (as branded providers of entertainment). This tension between branding and trusteeship has existed in American network television from the start, but shifts in industry emphasis became even more dramatic in the 1980s and 1990s.

With the current proliferation of programming choices and the expansion of channel competition during the digital era, branding has shifted from its status as an off-screen concern of marketing personnel and ad agency research, to a self-conscious form of promotional reflexivity that has also altered the very look and sound of contemporary television. The venerable “eye” of CBS and the once proud “peacock” of NBC easily ruled the roost of public consciousness as corporate symbols that stood above all sorts of lesser fare in the 1960s and 1970s.

Yet, by the mid-1990s, a large array of multichannel competitors had taken away the very viewership base that made the eye and the peacock almost universally recognized symbols in households across America. A few years earlier this decline in viewership and brand identity forced a boardroom shakeup at CBS, a takeover by GE of NBC, and a takeover by Capital Cities of ABC. A few years after that a second wave of takeovers and mergers followed when the same networks were the takeover targets of Viacom (CBS) and Disney (ABC). With upstarts like HBO, MTV, CNN, ESPN, FOX, WB, and UPN “cluttering” up corporate identities along with program choices in viewer living rooms, the major TV networks all embarked on public campaigns to “rebrand” themselves. CBS’s and NBC’s simple, stable, historic marquees of “quality” no longer seemed (to use Brandon Tartikoff’s terms) to bring acceptable numbers of viewers “into the network tent.”

Branding has been an obligatory marketing staple of corporate business strategies outside of broadcasting for many years. And while NBC once had the brand identity and loyalty of, say a Coca-Cola, it no longer did by the early 1990s. ABC garnered the lion’s share of critical and public attention for branding in its “yellow campaign” starting in 1997. No longer even an issue of typography and logo, ABC simply plastered the color yellow on every promo in print, broadcast, or billboard, along with ironic and knowing tag lines that mocked everything from the uncool tastes of parents (“this is not your father’s TV”) to the exaggerated claims of mental decline (that TV is mind-numbing and lowers literacy) and physical decline (programs for couch-potatoes) attributed to television by concerned consumer advocates and liberal watchdogs. True postmodern irony might be the well-earned reputation of actual programs on and by MTV, for example, but even if it did not have comparably hip programs, the ABC corporation could still front itself as postmodern by making irony and pastiche a part of every institutional and promotional self-reference. ABC put itself front-and-center by making the network packagers (rather than the production community) the authoring source of irony, and it signaled this new and very visible ever-presence with a branded promotional hue.

While ABC’s yellow campaign scored notoriety and endless news-hits for rebranding—in everything from the Wall Street Journal and New York Times to Entertainment Tonight and the tabloids—a comparably comprehensive on-screen overhaul of a network began in 1994 by NBC with its “NBC-2000” campaign (a campaign that set the standard for the subsequent re-branding initiatives at both CBS and ABC). NBC’s campaign involved far more than color and ironic tag lines. The smug confidence of the networks about their initial prowess in the multichannel flow had eroded to the point of crisis by the mid-1990s. With drastic loss in market share, the three major networks now needed a way to make not just audiences but also industry members aware of the power and benefits that came with the network “family.” The networks, that is, were in a state of crisis, with prognostications of demise or merger forming a steady rhetorical flow in the trades.

In 1995 and 1996, NBC counterattacked by borrowing former President Bush’s much maligned “thousand points of light” mythos. Research showed that the traditional four-letter station call-letters were simply too complicated for most viewers to remember. The response? Local stations owned by the national network were to drop the “K’s” and “W’s” nationally (as in “KNBC, Burbank”), and adopt the NBC plus channel number (“NBC-4, Burbank”) as a simpler, substitute designation and common logo. These nationally aired station/network IDs that focused on local affiliate stations, however, show the full extent to which anxiety about the network’s future ruled the corporate enterprise. As the camera scans a graphic map of the country in one set of NBC’s spots, hundreds of points of light mark the network’s “214 affiliates nationwide, including KJRH-2 Tulsa, Oklahoma.” This campaign, not illogically, followed soon after the much publicized “abandonment” of CBS by a number of long-time affiliate stations, which opted for the rising fortunes and hipper programming of the newer fourth network, FOX.

NBC’s celebration and symbolic construction of a network “family,” can be seen as a kind of preemptive corporate strike. It was, in essence, industry damage control aimed at vigorously reasserting the aura of network authority and quality. Not since the 1950s had the networks had to work this hard to teach viewers and stations about the benefits of national network affiliation. These kinds of mediating video texts also function as shorthand corporate reports for anxious affiliate stations that may have considered jumping ship. The top-down model of prestige programming (which includes Hollywood television and network news) has always promised to guarantee the welfare of the affiliate family members, broadcasting in the provinces.

The kind of aggressive, and heavy-handed, damage control evident in these spots came as part of a broader range of marketing “innovations.” NBC had also induced consent on the part of program producers to include the NBC logo “inside” scenes from aired programs themselves. This gambit amounted to a very clever sort of blackmail, since program producers for years have complained that license fees from networks were never fair (that is, never paid for the actual cost of program production). These costs were ultimately only covered through later syndication revenues that went directly to the producers’ companies. NBC here was subtly coercing its partners to erect televised billboards inside episodes that NBC had not fully paid for. Apparently, the long-term financial prospects of NBC were both significant and enough in jeopardy that program providers realized that their fates were ultimately affected by the “health” of the network that first launched them. By eliminating commercial breaks between shows, and by asking for network IDs within diegetic scenes, the network could promise greater viewer carry-over from show to show. Program providers could certainly appreciate this, if the networks “hammocked” them between strong, proven shows. But the real lesson of these programming moves lies in public consciousness that the fates of program producers, the network, and the affiliate stations were all very much intertwined. Both the network “family-of-stations” ID campaign and the tactic of intra-diegetic branding with logos stand as very public ways that television mediates and negotiates changes, even as it mollifies insecurities in the industry.

In a moment of feigned nonpartisanship, Today Show host Katie Couric announced that viewers were about to see the network’s “most dramatic make-over ever.” Visual evidence that something had changed in the aesthetic ways that the major networks did business came in the segment that followed, which summarized NBC’s 1994 campaign to overhaul its corporate logo and identity. The makeover also initiated a proliferation of intermediary video forms, all designed to drive home and publicly “manage” the overhaul in the audience’s mind. NBC’s marketing machine, that is, simultaneously flooded the programming world with intermediary texts that both legitimized and analyzed their “new” look and “attitude.” The once staid and venerable NBC “commissioned” cutting-edge “post-modern” artists (who they described as “the baddest” and “biggest names in design and animation”) to draft, engineer, sculpt, and animate the avant-garde look that expressed its newfound attitude. In essence, NBC had finally stopped ignoring its cable competitors, and now earnestly emulated Viacom/MTV’s house style—an approach that featured its ever-mutating brand-logo as a persistent part of each day’s programming.

The majors (NBC, ABC, and then CBS), thus consented not to the old goal of a stable corporate “brand,” but to the importance of something more volatile and lucrative—of “rebranding” as an evolving genre of “content,” as a defining index of a network’s personality, and as a media event in its own right. The imperative to rebrand was fueled in great measure by the growing sense that there now was simply not enough of an audience to go around; that is, not enough to share (profitably) with all of the competition. Although some critics (Lowry) counter that quality content (rather than a preoccupation with brands) will ultimately bring audiences back to the TV networks, the ratings and profits of those majors continue to decline. Others argue (Lindstrom and Andersen, Marrioti) that new digital technologies will endlessly splinter audiences and that innovative approaches to brand-building must necessarily be a central focus. Interactive-TV and dot-com startups continue to compete not just for viewers lost in the clutter, but for discrete “eye-balls” and “click-throughs” on the Internet as well. With no credible indicator of what will survive as the dominant economic model for profitability in interactive media (advertising, sponsorship, membership, or subscriptions), several other related trends have worked to counter the splintering. Corporate re-conglomeration, content multipurposing, and the possibilities of endless syndication have created new corporate aggregates (like Time-Warner-HBO-Turner-CNN, and Viacom-CBS-Paramount-UPN). These groups have essentially become “super-brands.” Such entities no longer attempt to standardize viewer-user taste into a mass demographic brand, but rather work to reaggregate potentially endless niche-tastes into branded “tiers” within the same conglomerate. In what some have wrongly termed the “post-network” age of television, innovative rebranding strategies stand at the center of current attempts to profitably “re-network” through mergers. These new networks intend to maintain (and capitalize on) heterogeneous audiences, but only within a single, newly branded conglomerate.