Apr 10, 2020 Streaming Strategy
Behind Pluto TV’s Brand and Product Relaunch
A new ad campaign shows off the platform’s updated brand identity and user experience with a simple invitation: “Drop In. It’s Free.”
Since the start of the year, Pluto TV has undergone a significant overhaul.
In a mark of its evolution from a streaming upstart to one of the largest ad-supported video platforms in the world, the recent rebrand includes an improved user interface, an updated brand identity, and a new consumer-facing advertising campaign. These aspects work together to encourage consumers to immerse themselves in Pluto TV.
“Our goal is to drive greater brand awareness, resonance and ultimately usage,” says Pluto TV Senior Vice President of Marketing Fran Hazeldine. “This is a new and distinctive presentation of Pluto TV that tells the story of our core offering and sets us apart from other brands that are entering the space.”
Pluto TV’s Improved User Interface: Project Venetia
The original Pluto TV interface gave users a simple channel listing with a video-on-demand button. Now users can favorite channels, create a watch list, choose channels and on-demand content by category, and access preview mode to see movie trailers and information.
“The greatest differentiator for Pluto TV will be how easy it is for our consumers to be able to find what they want to watch when they want to watch it,” says Pluto TV Chief Technology Officer Vibol Hou, who joined the company shortly before it launched publicly nearly six years ago. “We're working on all kinds of ways to enable that behavior.”
One feature the team left untouched: when users turn on Pluto TV, they land immediately on live content. They don’t need to log in or make a selection.
“The word we use internally is frictionless,” says Hou. “We want a user to enjoy a piece of content as quickly as possible. You turn it on, it’s just like television.”
The reconfigured and simplified interface also includes the return of a linear mainstay that has been markedly absent in streaming services: the ability to change the channel with one click. This addition resonates with users who are swamped by content-stuffed streaming services. As Alan Wolk wrote in FierceVideo, a pay-tv trade publication:
"By letting users easily click from one channel to the next, Pluto, whose main interface now consists of a series of genre-oriented channels, is not so much recreating the old school TV experience as it is bringing back serendipity.
"And in an age where we are already overwhelmed by the amount of available choices and about to be overwhelmed by even more, the idea that we can still find things randomly (rather than via a recommendation engine) is pretty radical."
Overall, the UX overhaul required a global team of program managers, product managers, product designers, and engineers. For more than a year, they worked together to integrate customer feedback into subsequent versions. The research department tested each iteration with consumers, tracking their eye movements and how they navigated the Pluto TV app. From there, a software engineering team adapted the plans that tested most positively to get the final product that’s now in wide release.
The effort was known internally as Project Venetia in honor of the woman who named the dwarf planet Pluto, Venetia Katharine Douglas Burney.
The new, improved UX is live on Apple, Android, Web and Roku devices, and launched in 17 Latin American markets on Android, Apple and web earlier this week.
Meanwhile, the team is focused on refining the Venetia experience based on customer feedback and are already working on enhanced search functions and a recommendation feature. The team also plans to add login and profiles to create a consistent Pluto TV user experience across devices.
An Updated Brand Identity: A Logo That Moves
In parallel to the product development, Hazeldine and his team worked with London-based agency DixonBaxi to refresh Pluto TV’s brand. They wanted to communicate the idea of Pluto as a unique destination, and give people the feeling of being transported there at warp speed.
The updated logo includes a custom sans serif typeface—Pluto TV Sans—in bold lowercase letters, with subtle details that convey a sense of movement and evoke planetary shapes. “The ‘P’ and the ‘O’ and then the circle around the ‘tv’ at the end creates a planetary echo. Almost like you’re en route to Pluto throughout the logo. But it also feels approachable and democratic, like the Pluto TV brand,” says Hazeldine. “The bold weight of the type creates a warmth, and a playful character .”
The momentum of the logo leads to four colored circles, known by its designers as The Portal, that nest behind the circle containing the word “tv.” The circles can nest or stretch in motion graphics treatments, evoking a sense of travel and arrival. “The Portal is really a graphic signature for the brand, that evokes this feeling of being transported, as if you're dropping into Pluto TV,” says Hazeldine.
The Portal’s four colors recall the Apollo era in spaceflight, a retro color palette that nods to space and to a pioneering, future-focused mentality. The colors also represent the diversity of content on Pluto TV. Four colors is enough to combine certain sets to represent particular genres, according to Hazeldine: magenta and yellow to evoke youth and reality TV, for example, or purple and yellow to align more with sports, or orange and yellow for a retro cult film.
The black and white in the logo are also important. “It’s the black of space, that is in high contrast to the white, which gives us boldness,” says Hazeldine.
New Consumer Campaign: The ‘Drop In’ Blitz
Pluto TV’s largest marketing campaign put a spotlight on its core strengths—it’s easy to use, it has a lot of content, and it’s free. The primary tagline is a simple invitation: “Drop In. It’s Free.”
Advertising agency 72andSunny helped to create the campaign concept, and Mediahub served as the media planning and strategy agency.
The campaign launched in early March with late-night commercials; connected TV and streaming audio ads; in-theater advertising; and an out-of-home campaign in New York, Los Angeles, Atlanta, Dallas, Chicago, Minneapolis, and Houston.
The campaign seeks to build Pluto TV’s rapidly growing user base with playful copywriting that underscores the platform’s most compelling features, like “100s of channels for zeros of dollars,” “really good TV that’s also really free,” and “watch TV without your ex’s aunt’s password.”
“We're getting at the core of the variety that you get, how easy it is to get it, but also the fact that it's free,” says Hazeldine. “As an idea, free TV is very powerful and magical. But what we started to layer in clearly is this sense that there's hundreds of channels now and this is incredibly easy.”
