Between the programme and the portal: Thinking about the future of transnational TV branding

Branding is often described as the defining industrial practice of television’s recent past (Johnson, 2007). As the frames that manage the interactions between viewers, content and producers, television brands operate at multiple levels (Johnson, 2012). Typically, scholars address these different levels as distinct practices. For example, the channel-as-brand model posits that strong channel brands help develop viewer loyalty and are crucial to commercial success in an increasingly competitive market. In contrast, the programme-as-brand model focuses on the ways in which the brand identity of a particular show can generate value across a range of cultural and mediated contexts. Yet thinking about these strategies in isolation becomes increasingly difficult in a transnational context (see Wayne, 2016). In this short piece, I propose that the increasing interpenetration of national and global television industries has created the need for new, more flexible ways to think about TV branding as an industrial practice that exists in the spaces between the programme, the channel and the portal. To support this claim, I use the branding strategies of two multichannel providers in Israel to highlight some of the ways in which national and global contexts overlap. First, I describe the strategy of legacy multichannel provider YES as they attempt to rebrand themselves as sellers in the global market. Second, I describe brand strategy of Partner TV, a new ‘over-the-top’ (OTT) multichannel provider, who has relied on Netflix’s global brand to establish a foothold in the local market. Taken together, the ways in which these national multichannel providers market themselves globally or utilise global brands locally demonstrate the need for new vocabularies to better describe emerging transnational television branding practices.

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