It feels like at least a decade since MTV truly did ditch music television for more reality-driven programming, but the stalwart cable network has finally unveiled its new logo to confirm it. While the familiar “M” and “TV” components are still intact, gone is the “music television” tag and instead we see a logo expanded to fit portraits of the channel’s reality stars including the cast of Jersey Shore and The Buried Life.
Tina Exarhos, MTV’s EVP of marketing and multi-platform creative projects, tells the NY Daily News that the network wanted the brand and talent (term used very loosely) to coexist in the same space. “If you watch the channel, you’ve seen that it’s definitely going in a new direction. We really wanted to see the logo featured in a new way, and this was really meant to be able to house all the great things that are happening at MTV at any given time.”
Like we needed a redesign to cringe at what MTV’s become, Exarhos adds, “It’s a fantastic, iconic logo, but it wasn’t working for us in a way that we needed it to anymore. It needed to express more about what MTV is today, not what it was in 1981.”