With 90% of the UK population now plugged into digital TV, the electronic programme guide (EPG) has become the Ordnance Survey map of the broadcasting landscape, helping millions of dedicated couch-potatoes navigate the multichannel world.
With this in mind, clear signposting of a channel's offer is vital for broadcasters hoping to attract the biggest audience. This may explain why UKTV is considering a U-turn by reinstating an umbrella brand. The aim is to give its portfolio greater coherence, just one month after concluding the process of ditching the UKTV prefix in favour of several different, eclectic monikers.
UKTV followed a template for each of the rebrands of its 10 channels based on the success of its transformation of UKTV G2 into Dave. The UKTV tag was withdrawn from the EPG and, after a dramatic change in the channels' on-air identities, viewers were flicking through channel names including Blighty, Home, Watch and Really.
Some members of the TV buying community were not convinced of the wisdom of this strategy. ‘In some instances, such as Dave, the rebrand was very successful,' says Simon Bevan, head of broadcast at Vizeum. ‘With some of the other channels, trying to understand [from the name] what the content includes is not always as clear.'
This conclusion is borne out by BARB figures. While Dave is still increasing its share of audience, aided no doubt by its position on the growing Freeview platform, UKTV's other changes appear to have confused viewers. From 27 April to 26 June, when it changed its name from UKTV Style, Home lost 14% of its audience share, year on year, while Really lost 30% between 18 May and 26 June compared with its iteration as UKTV Gardens.
In the broadcaster's defence, Tom Lucas, UKTV's director of marketing and communication, says that the planned changes are primarily intended to enable stronger cross-promotion. He denies that the UKTV name will be reintroduced, although he admits that an umbrella brand element has not been ruled out.
‘Over the past 18 months we took the channel brands and transformed them with more interesting creative. We can now create a new visual language to link them together so that the smaller brands can benefit from the bigger ones,' he argues.
Jim McDonald, head of TV at media agency MPG, thinks that the loss of the UKTV name, other than as a business-facing brand, is a shame and that some advertisers struggle to remember what the channels were prior to rebranding. ‘It matters to advertisers that the brands are part of the UKTV stable of channels,' he says. ‘The UKTV stamp gives it gravitas and security.'
The decision to drop the UKTV parent brand in favour of ones that are more evocative - if obscure - seems to have stemmed from an attempt to replicate the success of Dave. While that relaunch was a bold and imaginative step, the portfolio's array of differing content and the diverse target audiences meant that this strategy was always going to be difficult to apply across the board. Dave's mass target audience of young men is very different from the discrete, older and female-skewed audience of UKTV Gardens, who may be confused by its new name.
Although the possible introduction of a parent brand and an architecture that attempts to link the channels together have yet to be officially announced, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that UKTV should have made the key decision of how its portfolio would fit together before their rebranding began, rather than after the process had ended.