“It has been a joy to collaborate with Thornberg & Forester across many projects over the past few months. Their attention to detail, collaborative nature, and efficiency has allowed us to produce multiple video spots quickly all while raising the bar for the quality of the creative and final output. We’ve come to them with a variety of challenges recently, from tight timelines to implementing a new brand and working with tricky IP, and they have risen to the occasion every time – producing eye catching work that is consistently complimented by our organization’s leadership. I look forward to continuing our partnership and am excited for future work to come.”
– Marielle Avallone, Manager, Marketing & Creative Strategy
The perpetual evolution of the tech and media landscape requires major brands to constantly evolve as well. Spectrum selected Thornberg & Forester to design, edit, score and produce a vibrant, multi-tiered, campaign for their exciting new initiative – Spectrum Entertainment. Spectrum customers now have the ability to watch content from an array of major streaming brands, through the Spectrum TV® app.
In the modern-day streaming landscape, things change at a moment’s notice – as seen with Max’s recent pivot back to HBO Max, and Disney’s announcement to phase out the standalone Hulu app. Our brand-centric spots were also to include specific requests as to how each partner brand would be showcased. It was crucial to honor these requests while ensuring Spectrum would retain a strong voice of their own. Additionally, the Spectrum brand itself, is evolving – Spectrum is moving toward a bright, clean and crisp brand language, leveraging their opportunity for growth as a cutting edge tech company.
The main phase of this multi-tiered project, All Your Content, is a collection of 60 and 30-second spots that we produced for two markets – English and Spanish. The spots were designed to showcase the awesome content – movies, series, news and live sports – that fans can access through their SpectrumTV® subscription. In the modern streaming landscape, content often appears on multiple streamers, or moves from one streaming platform to another. Streaming partners also vary in requirements for their content to be showcased – including specific needs for tagging, logo application and legal disclaimers. In the end, our task was to build a visual system that would unify all disparate brand partner criteria, and to craft exciting edits that would deliver big impact.
The challenge when creating a spot showcasing a variety of streaming content is clear – how do we maintain a strong Spectrum brand presence while allowing each individual piece of content to have its own presence? We’re showcasing top-tier content, and well-known brands – Spectrum could easily be overshadowed by the sheer amount of messaging. We focused on creating nuanced connections between carefully selected clips through match cuts and similar moments – creating unity in our editorial process. Each spot feels like a single, unified and powerful call-to-action (and Spectrum brand expression) despite the litany of elements that were required.
Another phase of this initiative was the It’s All Here package of spots. The goal: highlight all of the established and popular brands that fans are able to access through their SpectrumTV® subscription. While this is a simple idea at its core, the execution was anything but straightforward. We were provided with a specific order to showcase the partner brands – which would require seamless integration from one logo to the next. We also animated brand-inspired versions of each partner’s established hero logo animation to capture individual brand integrity.
The spot culminates in a moment showcasing all of the brands simultaneously, bringing us into the world of Spectrum. We honed in on the idea of using app tiles to keep everything visually consistent. The repeating grid pattern created by the tiles helps to unify all of the disparate logo assets, creating a visually harmonious moment to showcase all that Spectrum has to offer. Delivery included 30 and 15-second HD and vertical spots for both English and Spanish markets, a 35-second HD in-store display, and an isolated delivery of the app tile moment and tagline.
Our pace was rapid, but still included an initial exploration phase before we landed on the final design direction. We explored a minimal, kinetic, direction that unified all brand partners over a white background, and a three-dimensional solution that would lean on dramatic lighting and spatial camera moves. Ultimately, the sense of scale and immersion created by our dynamic “logo tunnel” concept delivered most impact. This treatment checked all the boxes for the stakeholders at Spectrum, and for their brand partners. It was also most adaptable – the treatment would allow us to meet ‘on-the-fly’ needs of Spectrum’s brand partners in terms of shifts in specific color ways and TBD animation requests.
An extension of this phase included the design and production of a video ribbon for Spectrum’s retail locations. This piece would featuring Hulu as a streaming partner and be packaged in the look and feel of Spectrum’s master brand evolution. Again, with limited time, we presented a thorough initial design exploration, nailing down the final look in one round. Editorially, we captured directives from Hulu via the awesome team at Spectrum, ensuring shot selection, framing and pacing were on brand.
Prior to this multi-tiered project, we were engaged in a preliminary phase, where we explored the idea of showcasing the Spectrum brand alongside partner brands, on a broader scale. This phase was put on pause so we could focus on urgent deliverables (It’s All Here and All Your Content spots). Several strong ideas from this early phase informed our work moving forward. The excerpts below showcase some of our favorite designs, including a split-screen treatment, the use of a Spectrum forward symbol inspired X as a unifying device, and a geometric lockup idea based on shapes associated with key brand elements.
We are so grateful for our ongoing partnership with our good friends at Spectrum. It’s been a true honor to be in your corner for so many years. helping to promote the growth, spirit and authenticity of your brand.