Sky Crime / 2020 Promax UK SILVER - Channel Branding
The new destination for fans of true crime.
We built Sky Crime’s brand identity on a single insight: True crime fans love to play the detective. They want to be taken on a journey to the truth, to be shown all the facts, from every perspective; it’s about knowing the whole story. The simplicity of this insight, along with the focused channel proposition, allowed us to create a bold brand identity that would work across all platforms.
The yellow and deep blue colour scheme are an obvious choice for a crime brand and work well within the Sky portfolio. We really invested in the yellow line across all media, pushing across the screen and resolving in the logo; a bold reminder of a journey through the whole story. An important element of any brand is it’s tone of voice. Sky Crime is challenging, obsessive and direct; a true reflection of the content, expressed at first through big, bold typography. Given that so much of the genre presents raw home videos and CCTV, we introduced a glitching effect that also helps support an often sinister tone.
Our key insight highlighted that we were dealing with an inherently inquisitive and problem-solving audience. As such, we thought they would be the kind of people who felt empowered to play judge, jury and executioner themselves. The kind of people who want to make up their own minds. Our core creative thought was born out of this: ‘Question everything’. Across all of our media, we didn’t present our audience with statements or facts. Rather, everything featured a ‘?’ designed to empower them to make up their own minds.
Armed with a bold brand and a simple idea, we built an extensive and integrated campaign seeking to pique the interest of the target audience. Wordplay was at the heart of the campaign. Tapping into the opinionated and problem-solving traits of the audience, we offered up questions to be answered and problems to solve. It was for them to decide if someone was a scapegoat or a suspect. A companion or a killer. Because of this, people got to shape the creative as we presented it; taking sides watching the TV spots or listening to the podcasts, honing in on words that resonated with them in the OOH and casting their opinions actively in social media.
Credits
Design Director: Alex Haley
Senior Designer: Harry Ward
Lead Promo Creative: Ertun
Lead Campaign Creative: Oli Francis
Animation/Design: Savio Palmerston, Mark Jones, Sam Harvey
Strategy: Paul Sherman
Producers: Liz Arnott, Dani Sierra
Idents Director: Rob Blishen
Account Director: Sara Burton