TVACopied

TVA, the Quebec private broadcaster, unveiled its new identity on 11 November 2020: a new logo, a new slogan and a new digital platform, as Le Soleil put it. France Lauzière, president and chief executive of Groupe TVA, presented it on the set of a new winter show, with a promo in which the network's stars covered Céline Dion's J'irai où tu iras. The new mantra was TVA, on se reconnaît, roughly: TVA, where we recognise ourselves.

The project had taken about a year and a half. Le Soleil reported that Lauzière had challenged her team to update every aspect of the brand while respecting its DNA and cultural heritage and looking to the future. Grenier aux nouvelles added that the unveiling was delayed by the pandemic, and quoted marketing vice president Claude Foisy saying the brief was evolution, not revolution. Both outlets name COLAB Studio as the design agency; Grenier also lists ILOT stratégie + gestion de marque, Caserne and PARADE across strategy, graphics and sound branding, and both mention a wide Léger survey of Quebecers alongside interviews with staff, advertisers and artists.

The design idea is a refresh button. COLAB Studio's Hugues Choquette told Grenier the team pressed refresh, as on a website, without distorting the TVA logo. The new mark adds a colon and slashes from digital language, sitting between letters and symbols with a wink at emojis, and brings more colour and light because, he said, TVA is a brand of emotion. ILOT's Guillaume Mathieu said the dots and slashes also symbolise a mirror, tying the mark to the slogan. The previous logo dated from 2012, Le Soleil noted, and replaced one kept for 22 years.

The bigger move was digital: TVA+ replaced tva.ca as a free streaming platform gathering content from the main network and its specialty channels, with binge watching, which Foisy said viewers had explicitly asked for.

As a piece of brand thinking this is tidy: the slogan, the mirror reading of the punctuation and the platform all point the same way. The punctuation device is clever but literal, the sort of idea that dates as fast as the interfaces it quotes. Still, for a legacy network trying to look like an app without losing its older viewers, an evolution with a visible digital wink is the sensible bet.