MTV: Music Television, The Logo

Click here for my other posts about MTV.

The “first MTV logo, designed by Manhattan Design


The mutating MTV logo, 1981, designed by Manhattan Design, New York

I was the first Creative Director of MTV: Music Television, joining the parent company (then called Warner-Amex Satellite Entertainment Company) May 5, 1980. My boss, Bob Pittman asked me to oversee all of the original production and programming for the fledging cable television channel (who had even heard of cable TV as anything other than a service for rural audiences?) though I’d never seen a television camera.

The first job? Establish a vocabulary, “voice,” and look for the thing. The first move? Hire my oldest and best friends, Alan Goodman and Frank Olinsky.

In my MTV office, 1981.                 Photo by Alan Goodman

As far as I can remember, the article below was the first written on the MTV logo (designed by Manhattan Design —Pat Gorman, Frank Olinsky & Patti Rogoff— in their office in a second story spare room behind a tai chi studio, above Bigelow Chemists @ 8th Street & Avenue of the Americas in New York); it’s from June 1982, about 10 months after the network launched.  My favorite part is the illustration of the what was essentially the “first” MTV logo (illustrated above). Notice the section in the article on Nickelodeon was about their redesign, but that was only two years before Alan Goodman and I oversaw a the next change (designed by Tom Corey and Scott Nash) that lasted over 25 years.

You can read more about my adventures with MTV here or at The Fred/Alan Archive.

New Network Look: Hairy, Fat

The MTV Network IDs.

Alan Goodman & Fred Seibert, MTV IDs 1981-83 from fredseibert on Vimeo.

Here’s a compilation of the very first two years of MTV animated logos.

From the minute I went to work for Bob Pittman (he was 25, I was 27) at the Warner-Amex Satellite Entertainment Company in May of 1980, he told me about the company’s plan for a television channel that would be exclusively rock videos and how he envisioned the TV equivalent of radio jingles: network identifications (‘IDs’) short, wacked out pieces of animation that would reveal the network logo. Not like the staid CBS Eye (“You’re watching CBS.”) but rock’n’roll wrapped up into a little picture explosion.

As soon as we started working on what would become MTV: Music Television a month later I started thinking about these IDs and realized they could be the album covers of the new generation of music fans. For baby boomers the album cover came of age with the first American Beatles album representing every phase of their cultural development. I had bemoaned my lateness to that party, but my self-importance hoped the MTV network IDs could serve the same purpose.

Little did I know they’d achieve an almost equal prominence, and more. For me and Alan Goodman, my first partner in the enterprise (and countless more), they led the way for how we would become the first people to ‘brand’ American cable television networks throughout the 1980s. First as employees at MTV, then for our clients at Fred/Alan, we made over 1000 more of these 10-second visual operas for networks ranging from Nickelodeon and Comedy Central to TMTV in Japan and Lifetime. We worked with some of the greatest indie animators the world had to offer (some we’re still doing projects with today) and started a lot of companies on their way. These IDs might have been the most fun I had during the years we were doing television branding. (And for me, inadvertendly, they began what was to become a late life career change into producing cartoons.)

Update: I just got around to editing a new compilation of the IDs, using better quality video sources and adding more spots. You can view the original set by clicking here.

Click here for my other posts about MTV.

Not Fred Allen.

Alan Goodman & me. Photography by Elena Seibert,  hand coloring by Candy Kugel, 1983

Alan Goodman and I met at WKCR-FM, our college radio station, in 1970; we’ve been the greatest of friends and collaborators ever since. We tagged team each other on personal work projects for the next 10 years, and Alan was the person I turned to for guidance the night I made the decision to turn away from record production and move into cable TV. Six months later Alan joined me at MTV Networks.

For three years we helped turn the television world upside down and then we’d had enough. In April 1983 we booked the corporate life and set up Fred/Alan, Inc. (figuring all of our clients would have to be old to get the joke). At the start we thought the company would produce TV shows and movies; in fact the precipitating event that caused us to quit our jobs was a deal to make a music video show for The Playboy Channel.

The First TV Branding Company
But the thing that capapulted Fred/Alan was what turned out to be our innovative network branding work for MTV; no one had really thought about television the same way before. In quick succession we were able to develop and launch all the key MTV networks (Nickelodeon, VH-1: Video Hits One, HA! The TV Comedy Network, Comedy Central); and we virtually invented Nick-at-Nite, the very first oldies network). Most successfully, Fred/Alan was able to take Nickelodeon from worst to first in the ratings within six months and established their brand around the world (Alan and I have separately maintained relationships with Nick ever since).

Fred/Alan morphed into a full service advertising agency, adding media buying, print production, and account management to our creative and strategic capabilities. It was the first agency to brand itself as a demographically specialized company.

In 1989 we moved back into television series, setting up Chauncey Street Productions with our old friend Albie Hecht, and went on to produce hundreds of TV episodes for A&E, AMC, CBS, Comedy Central/HA!, MTV, Nickelodeon, and others.

But after a while we couldn’t take it anymore. Our branding approaches had become commodified as our more motivated former employees, the clients we had trained, and every graphic design firm all became media branding experts. We were turning down lucrative offers to buy the company since we knew it would require years more of servitude.

After many years together, Alan married my sister Elena in early 1992, and in February we announced the closing of Fred/Alan. Albie bought Chauncey Street, and Alan went on to become a successful writer/producer.

In June 1992, I became the president of Hanna-Barbera Cartoons.

(For more about Fred/Alan, check out The Fred/Alan Archive, 1983-1992.)

Photography by Elena Seibert

Nickelodeon.

Nickelodeon Logo Logic Publish at Scribd or explore others: Marketing Business branding logo

Fred/Alan was my agency in partnership with Alan Goodman and we worked with Nickelodeon from 1984 through 1992 as brand, marketing, and programming consults, as their advertising agency, and with Albie Hecht through it’s Chauncey Street Productions subsidiary, as television producers.

Alan Goodman has continued to consult and produce for Nickelodeon. I produce cartoons and consult for the network.