Sun, Nov 29, 2009 page12

• AOL revamps its logo in a bid to revive the brand

  The company hopes that a new logo with a period at the end to suggest ‘confidence’ will help end its old-fashioned reputation

  • By Stuart Elliott / NY TIMES NEWS SERVICE
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  AOL is taking a cue from Boy George, hoping to improve its karma by becoming a chameleon.

  A new brand identity to be adopted by AOL next month, when it is spun off from Time Warner, ditches the odd-looking triangle that has long served as the brand symbol and replaces the letters AOL with “Aol.” — complete with a period. (Perhaps that is what became of the period missing all these years from the logo of SOS soap pads.)

  Although the AOL logo itself will be constant, the backgrounds will change continuously in an effort to suggest the breadth of AOL’s content. Hundreds of backgrounds are ready to go, among them depictions of a fish, a skateboarder, a View-Master, a leaf, a lovable monster, a Polaroid camera, a high-heel shoe, a head-banging rocker and a kissing couple.

  Many backgrounds involve objects that float or fly: a leaping dog, balloons, a butterfly, a falcon. That is apt because AOL is eagerly seeking a way to soar as it did during the 1990s, when it was a premier, pioneering Internet service provider.

  Recently, AOL has suffered significantly as its subscription service declined along with its advertising revenue, its work force and its image.

  “AOL had such a clear meaning in the early days of the Internet,” said Allen Adamson, managing director of the New York office of Landor Associates, a brand and corporate identity consultancy that is part of the Young & Rubicam Brands unit of WPP.

  “To re-establish AOL as relevant today requires a massive shift in what it stands for to be effective,” Adamson said. “Being around a long time in technology is already one strike against you.”

  Although to many, AOL “signals your father’s Internet,” he said, the new brand identity retains the name.

  Tim Armstrong, chairman and chief executive at AOL, said: “There was a lot of feedback from people: Should we even stick with the AOL brand?”

  After studying research conducted by the Leo Burnett unit of the Publicis Groupe, which AOL hired in September; discussing the issue with employees and advertisers; and reading “a lot of e-mails from consumers,” Armstrong said the company decided to keep the name.

  It is “one of the most powerful brands on the planet,” he said, albeit one that “needs updating.”

  “AOL is a turnaround situation,” Armstrong said on Nov. 21 in a telephone interview. “It will take every ounce of blood, sweat and tears to make it successful.”

  Talk about a challenging assignment for an agency that develops brand identities. AOL turned to Wolff Olins in New York, a unit of the Omnicom Group, which Armstrong praised for its work on Product (Red), the initiative that raises money for AIDS treatment in Africa.

  “It’s not like there’s bad feeling toward AOL,” said Sam Wilson, managing director at the Wolff Olins New York office. “It’s more like ‘Make it relevant to me.’”

  The period in the logo was added to suggest “confidence, completeness,” Wilson said, by declaring that “AOL is the place to go for the best content online, period.”

  Armstrong said he liked to describe the period as “the AOL dot” because “the dot is the pivot point for what comes after AOL,” whether it is e-mail, Web sites or coming offerings that will “surprise people.”

  The constantly changing images behind the logo are also intended to elicit surprise, said Wilson and Jordan Crane, creative director at Wolff Olins New York.

  “It’s a mix of do-it-yourself and high production values, crazy stuff and elegant stuff,” Crane said. “Simple and engaging and bizarre — all the things the Internet is.”

  “The biggest risk was doing nothing at all,” he added, and not taking advantage of the attention generated by the AOL spinoff, scheduled for Dec. 9.

  Plans call for the new brand identity to begin appearing that evening and into Dec. 10. Print, video and online versions of the logo will appear on aol.com and a corporate Web site (corp.aol.com) as well as in AOL offices around the world.

  Jonah Disend, chief executive at Redscout, a brand strategy agency in New York owned by MDC Partners, was pessimistic about the plans.

  “I would get rid of the parent brand and dissolve AOL,” Disend said. “The assets are stronger on their own.”

  The problem is that AOL is “the My Little Pony of Internet brands, for when you’re starting out online,” he said. “The last thing you want to be is a nostalgic brand in a category that’s all about the future.”
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