In Advertising Age, Simon Dumenco wrote an article titled, “News Flash: Anything this Graphic Should Never Have a Logo,” about the way the TV coverage of the massacre at Virginia Tech used graphics that queasily resembled the branding of an entertainment event:
“During "Anderson Cooper 360" on Tuesday night, for instance, CNN's animated MASSACRE AT VIRGINIA TECH logo throbbed and twirled with all the subtlety of an "American Idol" bumper. MASSACRE was in a stark typewriter font (a transparent attempt, of course, at evoking the gravitas of gritty old-school journalism) in white against a blood-red background, with AT VIRGINIA TECH in black typewriter type just below it. A gaudy, twitchy animation effect caused the MASSACRE type to briefly explode outside of its red box, as did the AT VIRGINA TECH type a moment later. It took me a couple of rewind passes on my DVR to realize that the grainy gray background behind the twitching type showed a gun sight's crosshairs floating in slow motion across the screen.”
Another example: “ABC, in a minimalist mood, tagged its on-site reporting for "Good Morning America" with the words BLACKSBURG, VIRGINIA, and, in the lower left-hand corner, appallingly, a stand-alone graphic of a gun sight's crosshairs in white against a blood-red background.”
I’m teaching a branding mini-workshop in a couple of weeks, and I think writers and others need to establish a brand and back it up with relevant symbols, but it’s not hard to go too far—and in this case, as Dumenco points out, TV overstepped the mark.
(By the way, this article came to my attention via the newsletter of Bo Sacks, a publishing futurist whose website is www.bosacks.com.)