New:
Company, name, and logo

Launched:
May 12, 2004

Story in brief:
Vivendi, ten years ago a French water utility, had famously failed to transform itself into a media giant. GE, meanwhile, had not yet scaled its NBC interests up to that level. The acquisition of Vivendi's Universal studios property, added to NBC's broadcast properties, would create a more viable content giant, arguable “the premiere media company for the 21st Century.”

Credits:
CEO - Bob Wright
Identity counsel - Absent?
Logo design - As yet uncredited

First Impressions:
It looks like work still in progress, designed by investment bankers… an exceptionally weak corporate mark.

The name is what it is… initials plus an adjective, intended to signal “merger of equals” (to those few who will fleetingly remember, absent “Studios,” that “Universal” was once a company name). In no time at all, the second half of “NBC Universal” will atrophy; at seven syllables, it's two syllables over peoples' toleration limit for day-to-day use.

The logo, unfortunately, also appears to have been assembled from spare parts at hand, apparently without benefit of design… NBC's peacock (a vestige of the introduction of color to television) and a version of Universal's globe with continents, mercifully, deleted. In the print announcement ads, the name typeface shows Copperplate serifs, while the Web version is sans serif, an inconsistency suggestive of designer absence. Nor would a designer tolerate the incorporation of two symbols, competing graphic ideas, especially if the goal were to establish a single coherent entity. So — it's best understood as work in progress.

Tony Spaeth, 22. Jun. 04