“We’ve had the pleasure of working with Thornberg & Forester on SIX of our most ambitious marketing communications projects to date. They’ve blown us away each time with their thoughtful approach and gorgeous aesthetic! The T&F team is incredibly talented, professional and buttoned up. We love working with them.”
– VP, News Solutions at Turner
Among ten other agencies, Thornberg & Forester won a pitch to tell and sell the CNN brand story in a new and innovative way for their 2016 and 2017 upfront sales marketing force. The solutions were to be two, 90-slide decks (CNN Brand and CNN Digital) for CNN Marketing Executives to take on the road and present to media buyers and investors on a global scale. Design, presentation format, software recommendation, use of animation, and the ability for users to edit content efficiently were all to be considered in the pitch.
2019 marks our fourth consecutive year in partnering with CNN to create their Upfront sales marketing tools. This year’s theme is “Connect to What Matters.” We embraced the notion of connection by extending the two bars of the CNN logo. The bars represent a ‘CNN bridge’ that connects data to content and guides viewers through the presentation. At a foundational level, we utilized some our design thinking from 2018 as inspiration for general structure and typography.
For several years, T&F also partnered with Great Big Story – a cinematic storytelling company that creates resonant micro-documentaries and short films. Since their inception in 2015, GBS has amassed an amazing portfolio of real, moving content, and educational media that is shared, for the most part, online. Most recently, we took the core elements of the GBS brand and built an equally moving marketing deck that would arm GBS executives with branded tools to promote and sell GBS services.
We leaned on the strong, bold integrity of CNN and extrapolated the core elements of the brand DNA. Built upon a clean foundation of CNN red, white and light gray, we looked at positive and negative space, light and shadow, logotype architecture and fresh type systems. We worked very closely with the great team at CNN to land on a contemporary brand extension rich in meaning and striking in tone. The decks were thoughtfully choreographed with beautifully designed slides and fluid, immersive animation to operate effortlessly and seamlessly to the timing of the narrated scripts. The work was so well received, our designs were wrapped around a large wall inside the Time Warner building for the 2016 CNN Experience.
