The rebranded London Evening Standard:[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MSHaCzb3yYk[/youtube]
reports that Boris Johnson is to spend £2m on a global marketing campaign to “celebrate London’s diversity” and intends to “emulate the global recognition of New York’s simple but effective “NYC” logo.” Advertising agencies will be receiving an outline brief next week and Londoners will be encouraged to submit ideas. GLA Director Of Marketing, Dan Ritterband, said: “A strong brand identity is crucial to London and we are looking at ways of creating a more recognisable logo and slogan.”
The reference to New York’s “simple but effective NYC logo” would seem to be this Saatchi & Saatchi (who, incidentally, are responsible for the current TfL “Catch up with the Bicycle” campaign) reworking of Milton Glasers’s 1977 logo:
The commenters on Brand New’s article appear unconvinced. It if ain’t broke, don’t fix it?
The London “brand” will be unveiled in February, with roadshows visiting the Vancouver Winter Olympics, the Singapore Youth Olympics, the Delhi Commonwealth Games and the Shanghai World Expo.
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It’s worth noting, for pedantry’s sake, that the “I [Heart] NY” logo was created to promote New York State as a whole, so was never about NYC specifically (even though everyone thinks it is). I don’t think it’s used by officialdom outside the tourism arena – and certainly the City of New York has no particular claim on it.
Meanwhile the City itself actually uses a blue, orange (or is it red?), yellow “NYC” logo – as seen on their website:
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However the marketing and tourism outfit for NYC – called “NYC & Company” – use a different NYC-based logo, as seen here:
I’m wondering if Boris & co’s plan is to find a new “London logo” that will have a dual role as not only a tourism and marketing logo, but also as a logo to represent the Greater London Authority i.e. the Mayor. This might then replace the “MAYOR OF LONDON” logotype which was introduced under Livingstone. Boris has thus far sort-of retained the all-caps “Mayor of London” logotype albeit significantly changing it by ditching the “ON” element, i.e. the bit where the last two letters were picked out in a different colour (the default for said colour was red, but it could depend upon what the logo was ‘endorsing’, e.g. it was DLR turquoise when on DLR material). The problem being is that the adjusted all blue logo is now rather boring and dull.
(Yes yes, before the pedants attack I know that under the TfL design rules in London Buses material the “Mayor of London” element appears in all black, though in the old days the “ON” was of course in red. Plus it’s also a bit more complicated than merely saying the logotype is simply ‘all blue’ nowadays – where the so called “Mayoral endorsement” appears on TfL material, it’s in darker ‘TfL blue’, but on the Mayor of London website it now appears in lighter Tory blue.)
I think the NYC logo they’re referring to is the one on nycgo.com
@Matt – Blimey. Is that an effective logo? At first glance it looks like something a haulage firm would use.
This exercise in marketing London of course comes after Boris Johnson’s administration spent its first year demolishing the integrated marketing mechanism ‘London Unlimited’ set up under Ken Livingstone, sacking all its staff and abolishing its budget. In short wasting an entire year only to put back in place, with half the budget, that which they abolished.
We will see what logo the adverrising people come up with but frankly it is very far from being the most important thing. Under Ken Livingstone London was rated regularly the number one city in the world, ahead of New York, and had some of the most advanced marketing in the world – as could be seen in winning the Olympic Games and the international media coverage London received. It never concentrated on a logo but on projecting London as the most international and modern city in the world – all of which is being undermined by Boris Johnson’s demolishing of London’s marketing apparatus and such inanities as making a centre piece activity celebrating the coronation of Henry VIII.
Surely there is a very adequate, universally-recognised, t-shirt friendly, London logo: the Underground bar-and-circle (now adapted for the other aspects of the Capital’s transport infra-structure).
All that has to happen is to change the text in the bar according to need, and perhaps mess around with the combinations of colours. Keep the New Johnson type-face, of course.
So, where do I claim my prize money?
@ Malcolm Redfellow Yes, the LT Roundel is universally recognised; not sure TfL would want it appropriated by Boris, though!
I certainly don’t agree with Ritterbrand that the nycgo.com logo has “global recognition” – and I don’t choose to travel to one capital city over another because I prefer the typography on their publicity.
Terms like “brand identity” applied to cities make me queasy.