The CW Completes Its Nexstar Transformation With Rebrand

It’s like Nexstar has dared to defile the toy they’ve been given

As The CW just begins the 2024 portion of its first season under Nexstar ownership, and now, in time for Sunday’s Critics’ Choice Awards, it’s undergoing its first major image overhaul in quite a while, with an “evolution” in its logo and brand identity. The new red and orange-dominant color palette is affectionately called “CW hot sauce”.

While the era of the green the network was known for was deemphasized by the time this new look was debuted, it had become signature enough to be acknowledged here. The also well-known “Dare to Defy” tagline had evolved to “Dare to Love. Defy Hate” some point after the 2019-2020 season, and evident in 2022, just in time to be on the market. The station ID at the start of every show began using a multicolor gradient background. The network’s YouTube avatar used red, blue, and lighter blue like paint splatter gradients until this rebrand. One could see it in Wikipedia’s picture of the CW Sports logo as of publishing. The network’s chief marketing officer Chris Spadaccini said “The CW is in the middle of a brand transformation, and a new network deserves a new look and feel”. He continued, seeming to acknowledge the sort of limbo and half-measures, “When I got here, not only did I arrive to find a logo that was slightly dated, there was really zero consistency in terms of how we presented our brand. Everything just looked very different. Even though I love the programming and even the marketing creative was great, there was really not a very well defined brand behind it. That was the impetus for the project when… Brad [Schwartz] hired me.”

The “The” in The CW, at least in the logo, is gone. It was deemed “unreadable” on several platforms, which created problems in executive eyes and instead will be “implied” as the network continues to go by The CW. It also didn’t gel well with different divisions. As Spadaccini explained “We’re not ‘The CW Sports’. We’re ‘CW Sports’. We’re not presenting ‘The CW Original,’ we’re presenting a ‘CW Original’. But we are still very much ‘The CW.’ That’s how people refer to us. That’s how the press refers to us. Even if I tried to drop the, it would be impossible because in the culture, we’re always ‘The CW.’ It’s not ‘The NBC’ or ‘The ABC,’ so it kind of differentiates us.” If anything, this means they at least know the brand to the extent that at least a complete name change is out of the question.

As far as the new color palette, it was “challenging”, because of “how cluttered the landscape is,” Spadaccini said. He brought up how blue was needed to be avoided between Paramount, Disney (while Junior isn't very blue, both Channel and Plus very much are), Amazon, Max, and even Fox. In describing the new “hot sauce” choice, he says “We think it’s cool because it’s warm, it’s energetic, it’s accessible, it stands out.” The primary background color, used for social media avatars as well as the network’s app, is a pink he’s calling “icing” and tertiarily a light green he dubs “mint” will also be used.

Spadaccini goes into a lot more of what they’re doing with the branding, but it’s worth looking at how The CW steps forward eager to get their original scripted programming going as the results so far has been rather haphazard. They got LIV Golf and ACC basketball and football, as well as Inside the NFL, and over the next couple of years, WWE NXT and NASCAR’s Xfinity series. The cheap import strategy has not led to great results. Australian series Bump and Barons were pulled midway through respective second and first seasons, Down to Earth With Zac Efron and Fantastic Friends hosted by Harry Potter’s Fred and George Weasley, James and Oliver Phelps, were each pulled after two episodes, and now somehow, the network has managed to grab ongoing ABC sitcom The Conners onto their own primetime lineup to replace Canadian sitcom Run the Burbs and British series Everyone Else Burns. The new sizzle reel features plenty of Superman & Lois, Walker and All American, but also the new co-production Wild Cards with Vanessa Morgan (premiering in the US on Wednesday) and Joan with Sophie Turner. And it seems without any megaconglomerate associations they are more than happy to carry on and plug their free ad-supported network app.

Sources: Variety, TVLine (1, 2)