MTV changed their logo. So what? Fine. I admit I haven’t cared much about MTV in a long, long time, but I still feel a little funny. MTV was my Sesame Street. I was raised by Martha Quinn, Alan Hunter, Headbangers Ball, Kurt Loder, Pauly Shore—all of them.

I loved MTV.

So the logo feels like my cooler older sister just got a facelift. It’s still her, but she kind of looks off. Very simply, it’s a refreshing of the mark rather than a redesign. And a facelift is just a nip here and tuck there, right? They’ve dropped the “music television” descriptor, which is appropriate. The “M” has been cropped and widened, and the stroke on “TV” has been cleaned up, which is nice. Creative Review notes the updated logo allows MTV to house imagery within the widened “M” letterform:

The space in the new logo will be used more to push its programming and its endless procession of reality TV micro-celebrities than as a canvas for artists, and animators as it once was.

Sweetness! I was hoping they’d figure out how to incorporate Snookie in their logo.

Bobby over at Kitsune Noir has some good observations regarding the evolution of a 30-year-old brand:

MTV has become a household name, those three letters alone. I don’t think I’ve ever heard someone call it Music Television before and I grew up in the 80’s. It’s the same as other major networks. You don’t get your news from the Cable News Network, you don’t tune into the Home Box Office to see True Blood and you don’t hate the National Broadcast Company for screwing over Conan. These three letter acronyms are culturally built-in at this point and after almost 30 years MTV deserves the same treatment.

Fair enough. I do think that many people will feel like this is absolute admission of a betrayal of the channel’s initial and core philosophy—playing music videos. Not that anyone has the patience to watch an entire music video these days.

Tina Exarhos, executive vice president of marketing and mulitplatform creative projects at the network, sums it up best:

I’ve been at MTV a long time, and as it was reinvented over the years and maintained sort of a fluid nature, we never touched our logo, which is sort of ironic. It’s a fantastic, iconic logo, but it wasn’t working for us in a way that we needed it to anymore. It needed to express more about what MTV is today, not what it was in 1981.

In other news, I am officially old.

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One of our newest clients is the Hangout Music Festival. There’s not a whole lot we can say about this yet except: 1) it’s on the beach in Gulf Shores, Alabama; 2) it’s May 14-16; 3) the acts are going to be killer; 4) we’re handling the design, advertising and PR.

According to stories that have run in the press, the festival will be the surfside equivalent to the Rothbury Festival and Coachella.

Acts will be announced soon. You can read more here, and be sure to sign up for email updates.

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There are lots of things that can make or break a television spot, and music is one of those things. It can set tone, create emotion, take the audience to exactly where you want to take them. And that’s what brands should do too: make people feel something.

So it’s poll-taking time: What are the current best ad/song combos? What are the worst?

The Ask.com jingle is immediately disqualified for being so bad that I kind of like it. I keep that bottled in a very secret place, where I keep things like my admiration for Justin Timberlake.

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Okay. As a follow up to the last blog post lamenting the lost art of the mixtape, here’s something that was passed around the agency yesterday: the Mixtape USB stick.

Street cred for your digital music, I guess.

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Here’s a great illustration of social media’s relevance. In Chicago on Friday afternoon, needing something to do for the evening, I go to Twitter and ask: Anybody know of any killer live music happening in Chicago tonight?

Within minutes I’m getting suggestions, and seven minutes after my post, @trdunn writes: Check out The Drummers at @Schubas. Awesome venue with an awesome band tonight.

Boom. Plans made. Thankyouverymuch. As for the show, Drummer was great. But I really liked the openers, Royal Bangs. In fact, to keep the organic mojo happening, I’m going to politely ask you download their stuff.

Pay it forward, social media style.

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