Sorry for the long walk down memory lane/rant…
Didn’t they also still have the dotted 9WIN logo at the time which helped with network association and recognition when the Nine logo was still seen?
Nine had a good affiliate branding scheme with their dotted logo until the dots were briefly removed during the leadership of that fool from Collingwood, WIN & NBN lost their dots going with a rounded font for their ‘logos’, mappy had appeared (transparent then) and of course Bruce Gordon never brought back the dots.
That dotted co-branding was great as Nine has recently realised by extended it to their secondary channels; wanting to have some association with the network brand on secondary channels is understandable, and (perhaps a little surprisingly) the 7 co-branding is working pretty well now too (ignoring SC).
Weren’t GEM & Go! originally not having Nine-specific branding deliberate, being nice to Bruce (& any other affiliates at the time), at least partly?
Of course that wasn’t good enough for Bruce so he bit the hand that fed him including with the first iteration of his own crude attempt at co-branding with huge solid logos on-top of Nine’s watermarks, which he’s doing again now on One & 11.
Let’s also remember that even before secondary channels existed the rebranding was basically a nonsense; about 23 h/d it was Nine content, with it being only slightly less Ten content now.
Almost 15 months after the end of their Nine affiliation WIN are still using their old Nine-era rounded font logo instead of refreshing their branding & presentation to best integrate with Ten; no wonder it looks so disjointed.
WIN need to realise they can’t win a rebranding war (they lost with 9GEM, 9Go! & 9Life); it is off-putting to viewers and Bruce’s on-screen shitstains just accelerate the decline in broadcast TV.
He’s again gone too far co-branding secondary channels which - unlike Seven’s (or now Nine’s) - don’t have a network brand. This doesn’t really strengthen the WIN brand; it’s too off-putting so I’d say the negative outweighs any positive.
Hopefully when the affiliation agreement is next negotiated CBS won’t put up with so much of Bruce’s crap.
There’s no way that Ten Eyewitness News is avoiding a logo cover up just because of niceness on Bruce’s part, it has to be a contractual requirement, so I hope such restrictions will be extended to disallow the solid monstrosities we’re seeing now.
Perhaps Bruce has seen what CBS are like to affiliates in their home country and as CBS want to grow their brand internationally there’s no way they’d be inclined to allow Bruce to cover it up like he’s doing to Ten now.
WIN need a new branding strategy, a new consistent logo (get rid of the Nine-ish font), maybe even a new name entirely (but I’ve always thought WIN was a stupid name), but importantly not pissing viewers off with huge solid logos on-screen, but whatever they do it needs to be something positive which works alongside Ten’s branding and soon probably the CBS brand too.
Prime7, GWN7, SC9 are doing fine so is there really a need for a separate & strident “WIN” brand?
