Avid

New:  Logo, visual system and brand architecture

Launched:  April 20, 2009

Story in brief:
At birth (in 1987) Avid was given a clever name, reflecting its video ambitions. Twenty-two years later it gets an equally clever wordmark (or is it a symbol?), appropriate to a masterbrand in video and audio production.

This is a classically strategic rebranding. It expresses (and enables) migration from a loosely connected portfolio of companies, to a more tightly integrated and master-branded operating company. "It's not really a rebranding" says Thomas Ordahl, corporate brand strategy director, "because we previously went to market as five different companies, and Avid was just one of them, more a product brand than corporate. It is now all of them, and really a new brand."

Avid was founded in 1987 to market Avid Media Composer, the first digital editing system to replace traditional tape-based methods. "The Avid" is used today by the majority of the world’s professional film and television editors. Its rapid success helped fund further innovation, and then successive acquisitions that together could give Avid a commanding position spanning audio and video production technologies – could, that is, but didn't, because instead of assuming the Avid brand, the acquired "company" brands were retained, and at best endorsed in small type as "an Avid  company" or "part of Avid." Ordahl: "We went to market as five different companies."

About eighteen months earlier, CEO Gary Greenfield began a sweeping reorganization. The five company silos would vanish, to be replaced by technology-segmented production teams and customer-segmented marketing teams. "We are stronger as one company  than we are as separate parts,", he said. "Our customers want integrated, interoperable, and open audio and video offerings."

One brand would cover all.  The current Avid brand was seen as "tired and weak," and too limited for this challenge.  Carter Holland, VP Corporate Marketing, searched consultants, and on Christmas Eve 2008, The Brand Union won the assignment. Shortly after, Holland added Tom Ordahl  to his team, as Corporate Brand Strategy director.  (Note: As a Partner at Group 1066, Ordahl helped direct the Lodgenet rebranding in 2008.)

Brand Union (pardon, The Brand Union) was given a launch target of April 20 , at the National Association of Broadcasters convention. That left 16 weeks, including time for booth design and production, and corporate Web site re-skinning.  Fast work needed. TBU's Creative Director Dennis Thomas reports: "We showed several solutions but the button-forms idea made so much sense it won immediate favor. The forms are universally recognized, yet Avid can almost preempt them, own them. " Purple was retained, for equity, and subtle gradients were added, "another tool which in some media can add interest and liveliness, if carefully managed" says Thomas. "But we have a flat purple version too."
 

The new brand was indeed launched at the NAB show, with transformative impact. CEO Greenfield again: "Our new identity is one of the powerful ways we are communicating the evolution of our business."

Credits:
C.E.O. - Gary Greenfield
- Carter Holland, VP Corporate Marketing
- Thomas Ordahl, Sr. Director, Corporate Brand Strategy
Identity counsel and design - The Brand Union

First Impressions:
Strategy:  Unimpeachable. Cuts and pools costs, putting all communication resources into one brand and one coherent story.
Design:  Interesting trade-offs. It's a unique mark, distinctive, undeniably clever. On the other hand the name is now marginally legible (does this matter?) and, to me at least, the resulting form is not a thing of beauty (but again, does this matter?). Not the best rebranding of 2009 perhaps, but maybe the most interesting.

Other comments:
From Jerry Kuyper: "I think spacing the elements equally, as if they were letters, would have improved the legibility as well as the visual appearance of the new AVID logo. Currently the A and V pair up as one unit and the I and D pair up as another unit.

"Acknowledging the optical necessity of having the top of the A and the bottom of the V extend above and bellow the adjacent horizontals would have been helpful as well.

"The rudimentary sketch below demonstrates the point. Taking a logo the last 5 percent is always the toughest part."

                    

Corporate Brand Matrix ratings:  
0% structural,  100% strategic,  0% functional (est.)