It's MTV, minus the "music television."
The network that launched the video about killing the radio star has redesigned its iconic logo - to take out the music video.
The new look, revealed on-air yesterday, features the original 3-D large "M" with the small, graffiti-style "tv" on the right side. But the new design is expanded, so that photos of MTV talent, including the cast of "Jersey Shore," "The Buried Life" and "My Life as Liz," can be seen through it.
And, for the first time in almost 30 years, the logo drops the "music television" tag line altogether.
"We were really thinking about it in terms of having the brand and our talent living in the same space together," Tina Exarhos, executive vice president of marketing and multiplatform creative projects, told The News.
"If you watch the channel, you've seen that it's definitely going in a new direction," said Exarhos. "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."
Exarhos said the network started thinking about an overall redesign at the end of last year. While other aspects of MTV had evolved, the logo was always something that had stayed the same, and talk of updating it seemed almost blasphemous.
"I've been at MTV a long time, and as it was reinvented over the years and maintained sort of a fluid nature, we never touched our logo, which is sort of ironic," Exarhos said. "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."
Over the past few years, MTV has come under fire from critics and fans who say the network known for music television no longer played music videos. And while fans can check out artists on sister stations MTV2, MTV Hits and MTV Tr3s, MTV itself has moved on to more reality and, in the upcoming months, scripted programming.
Ditching the longstanding "music television" tag line seems like a signal that the network has accepted where it now stands.
"From a truly design perspective, we didn't look at losing 'music television' for any other reason than from a functionality standpoint," said Exarhos. "But we realized that it would have an impact if we took that off. I think those who watch MTV today think about it as much broader than music television.
"Music is still at the heart of everything we do, but it's about a lot more now," she added. "If MTV didn't change, we'd be irrelevant."
Frank Olinsky and his team at Manhattan Design created the MTV logo when the network launched. When the change was announced yesterday, Olinsky wasn't feeling much nostalgia.
"I had no idea" the change was coming, said Olinsky. "MTV now is a whole other reality than MTV was back in the day. Things change. The fact that it doesn't say 'music television' anymore, that's appropriate."
