MTV started broadcasting as a 24/7 music video channel in 1981, giving the public the first way to easily access music videos and giving artists of all levels of fame a chance to present their music as well as to show their creativity visually too. This also gave smaller artists the opportunity to have their music heard by many who wouldn’t have heard it otherwise, and helped to bring some bands their fame, like Nirvana, Dire Straits, and Huey Lewis and the News (Kachejian, 2023). MTV quickly went from being a show only airing in New Jersey, aimed at teenagers and showing nothing but music videos, to being the biggest music broadcaster in the world, expanding to also broadcast original reality television and animated shows. It only took two months for record stores to be selling music which was only being played on MTV since radio stations thought it wasn’t mainstream enough to be worth playing (Denisoff, 1988). However, their focus on a single target audience faded as popularity grew and MTV went from serving the underground and independent to focusing on more mainstream material, much like the radio stations which the channel originally started to overthrow.
MTVs logo is easily recognizable and has hallmarks of what they are trying to present their brand as. The name “MTV” stands for Music Television, which is stated at the bottom of the logo. However, in the logo the first thing the audience is drawn to is the “M”, separating it from the “TV” through stylistic choices. The bold, block typography draws you in and makes you wonder what it could stand for, while the “TV” directs the viewer to it being the logo for a television channel. The font of the “TV” part of the logo is like spray paint, which has semantic links to rebellion and therefore youth, but more specifically, younger people who are part of alternative cultures. The choice of the size of the “M” also suggests that this is the largest and most important part of the logo, and because music channels weren’t widespread in the USA as they were in England with shows like Top of the Pops, the fact that this is a music channel is an important and unique selling point that they want to get across to anybody who might just be searching through channels or looking through a television magazine. This version of the logo was the more formal version, but there were many different varieties which were shown in the splashes during commercial breaks which had the same shape but with a more pop art/street art design.
These logos were designed to be more focused on capturing the attention of their target audience of teenagers, as well as being something that would easily catch anybody’s attention who might see it. On February 8th 2010, the text at the bottom of the logo was removed from the official logo, as MTV was a very well established brand by this point and because MTV had been mainly focusing on reality television for nearly two decades and as the Head of Marketing for MTV said at the time, “The people who watch it today, they don’t refer to MTV as music television. They don’t have the same emotional connection that, say, the people who are writing about [the logo change] do” (Exarhos, 2010).
The target audience being teenagers influenced how the brand marketed themselves. Their broader age range was 12-34, with MTV being the most watched channel for people between 18-34 which is considered a prime demographic for advertisers (Lane, 2019). One of the many “on-air station-identification campaigns” that MTV ran was inspired by the “instructoart” art style, which involved presenting ideas in the style of an airplane instruction pamphlet. MTV hired the artist, Matt Vescovo, who created this genre to create some short animations for these slots which they titled “Watch and Learn”. These were inspired by MTV being viewed as brainwashing the youth, so they wanted to mock this idea by giving harmless but comedic advice and telling the youth of America to “watch and learn”. The design and the animation of these slots was also very in line with the target audience with being a simple but funny animation which attracted younger people to watch the channel because this was quite a popular segment, even though they were only around 20 seconds long each. This also played into the idea that young people were susceptible to propaganda and therefore would listen to everything that was told to them on television. MTV being the most popular television channel for people aged between 18-34 also helped MTV know how they should advertise either their own products like different shows they were broadcasting and also other companies products. This level of knowledge helped MTV make money and become more popular since the advertising they were putting out was working with people either buying things or staying to watch more shows, proving to them that their target audience was indeed quite easily brainwashed. This is what eventually led to the downfall of MTV however as they started trying to do what they thought the people wanted, such as showing reality television instead of music videos and changing too much as time went on without then changing when their audiences interests changed. In 1981 there wasn’t just a gap in the market for music television broadcasters, there wasn’t any market to begin with. Even though shows like Top of the Pops had already existed and gained a following, there weren’t any channels specifically dedicated to music and to showing music videos, especially not in America. When MTV started they used videos which were made for Top of the Pops since there were a lot of them and not too many American bands with music videos because before MTV existed, there wasn’t much point in creating a music video to go along with your songs. This caused a lot of British bands which weren’t too well known in America to be played often in American households, causing the Second British Invasion of music, the first being decades before when The Beatles became popular (Molanphy, 2011). The creation of MTV was bound to have become popular as it was something that the industry was missing and because “executives at the newly formed Warner-Amex Satellite Entertainment felt teenagers were an overlooked and potentially lucrative audience” (Behr, 2021), meaning that they just had to look at what teenagers were interested in and produce a product which provided that to them all of the time.
The idea to create a music channel which played music videos constantly and targeting that to an under-targeted demographic is a perfect use of the Blue Ocean Strategy. This strategy involves looking at an already existing market and thinking about what you can create or do which will fit into this market while still being so different that you don’t have to compete massively with other companies which are already well established and will take your consumer base from you. Robert W. Pittman, who created the idea of MTV and later became the CEO of MTV Networks, tested the idea for a music based show which didn’t show live music acts like all the other music shows at the time by hosting a 15 minute show called “Album Tracks” on WNBC (Hilburn, 1986). This is when he realized that this kind of programming wouldn’t work since people wouldn’t be able to tune in once a week to try and catch what they wanted to watch because it would be different artists every time and people wouldn’t know whether they’d like what was going to be on. Therefore with the targeting of a teenage audience, who are the most open to discovering and exploring new artists and genres, and being the first 24/7 music video channel, people could just tune in and watch whatever was on, whether they knew what it was or not. This format was heavily similar to what radio stations had been doing, playing music that you might not know 24/7, but where MTV expanded on this was not only through showing videos which accompanied this music, but wanting to show off a wider range of music rather than just what they thought would get them the most views. By doing this, they became one of the only authentic music brands at the time and therefore ended up attracting many more viewers by playing things that they weren’t familiar with. By taking the already successful format which radio had been using and putting it on television where nothing else was doing anything similar, MTV redefined the consumption of music and created a unique market space instead of joining a competitive, pre-existing format.
The Consumer Behaviour Theory, which underlines how understanding the way consumers interact with a product emotionally and cognitively can help brands to craft ideas which align with the preferences and trends of consumers, can be related to the way that MTV understood their target audiences relationships with the music they listen to, and therefore targeted the music towards them. This understanding of how they should run their brand led them to be so well known that children whose formative years were in the 1980s were named as the “MTV Generation” due to how much of an impact the channel had on their lives, even if they didn’t watch it. MTV would dictate several aspects of pop culture, such as mainly giving teenagers new music to listen to since MTV would study what kind of music was popular for this age range and then would play music similar to that. It would also influence what fashion styles were popular, either by showing teenagers what their favourite artists were wearing and what they were making themselves look like in music videos or with the fashion of celebrities in different reality shows. These reality shows also presented younger audiences with an easy glimpse into the lives of celebrities, which were previously difficult to see, such as The Osbournes which had cameramen placed inside the home of Ozzy and Sharon Osbourne to see what their day to day lives were like. Shows like this also started to ramp up the craze of parasocial relationships, where teenagers felt connected to these celebrities as if they were part of their lives. MTV saw that they were heavily influential towards teenagers music listening habits, fashion styles, and understanding of popular culture, and therefore leaned into these things and tried to specifically use these to make sure they kept watching every day to see what the next big craze was about and to make sure that they were connected in the social loop so they didn’t seem dated. The music that MTV played was also the genres and styles which teenagers likes the most at the time because MTV had an understanding of how for most people, the music they listen to was a big part of who they are, and by playing multiple different popular styles of music, they would make everybody feel like they are seen and give them a place to express themselves.
References
(1988). In R. Serge Denisoff, Inside MTV (p. 86). Transaction Publishers.
Behr, A. (2021, August 14). 40 Years of MTV: the channel that shaped popular culture as we know it. Retrieved from Salon: https://www.salon.com/2021/08/14/40-years-of-mtv-the-channel-that-shaped-popular-culture-as-we-know-it_partner/
Exarhos, T. (2010, February 8). MTV drops ‘Music Television’ from the network logo. Retrieved from The LA Times: https://www.latimes.com/archives/blogs/show-tracker/story/2010-02-08/mtv-drops-music-television-from-the-network-logo
Hilburn, R. (1986, September 5). MTV CREATOR TACKLES NEW GOALS. Retrieved from The LA Times: https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1986-09-05-ca-13396-story.html
Kachejian, B. (2023). Classic Rock History. Retrieved from 20 Acts That MTV Made Super Famous: https://www.classicrockhistory.com/20-acts-that-mtv-made-super-famous/
Lane, M. (2019). MTV Networks Company. Retrieved from Encyclopedia: https://www.encyclopedia.com/marketing/encyclopedias-almanacs-transcripts-and-maps/mtv-networks-company
Molanphy, C. (2011, July 29). 100 & Single: The Dawning Of The MTV Era And How It Rocket-Fueled The Hot 100. Retrieved from The Village Voice: https://web.archive.org/web/20131020163021/http://blogs.villagevoice.com/music/2011/07/mtv_billboard_music_videos_charts_human_league.php?page=2
