Rebrands are hard — but rebrands that incorporate news titles across print and digital and aim to unify a host of disparate titles are really hard. However, that’s what Mediahuis Ireland has completed for its flagship news brand, the Irish Independent.

The Irish Independent is a brand with great heritage. It’s Ireland’s best-selling daily title, and its sister brand, The Sunday Independent, is Ireland’s best-selling paper. They’ve been published for nearly 120 years. Some of Mediahuis Ireland’s local titles are even older: The Sligo Champion launched in 1836, and the Argus in Dundalk has been around since 1830.

We aimed to create a new master brand for all these titles, pooling brand equity and promoting the Irish Independent as a singular news brand rather than a collection of news formats. It was a complex project: Print templates, mastheads, point of sale, Web sites, apps, third-party integrations, above-the-line marketing, B2B collateral.

You name it, we changed it. 

We successfully delivered it through adherence to three principles applicable to any large-scale project where success depends on many stakeholders working together.

Here’s a closer look at those three principles in practice.

1. The principle of alignment

The successful rebrand depended on alignment at every level of the organisation to ensure a clear vision for the project.

Crucially, we aligned around a commercial aim, not an aesthetic one. We wanted to increase the marketing spend’s ROI by creating a unified architecture for Independent brands. The marketing team initially defined this with great clarity, alongside a roadmap for strategic alignment of those brands.

The Mediahuis Ireland board, senior management team, and all stakeholders working on the project bought into this roadmap. By ensuring all stakeholders understood the collective aim, we could mediate between the many imperatives within the publishing businesses.

Even thorny discussions (surprisingly few) were resolved because we aligned with a clear commercial objective.

2. The Real Madrid principle

Real Madrid isn’t the only team to buy the best football players, but it’s the one best known for the Galacticos strategy. We wanted to get the best players on the pitch — just as Real Madrid bought Zidane, Beckham, Cristiano Ronaldo, and Karim Bemzema, etc.

We chose to work with Mark Porter Associates. Porter is the former creative director at The Guardian and has been called a “titan of editorial design.”

He assembled a team of design Galacticos: Clare Bell, a design lecturer at Technological University Dublin, joined designers Alan Keer and Oliver Bothwell and Signal Type Foundry’s Max Phillips. Andy Goodman was chosen to create a lively illustration style. Animation and motion graphics were from Smorgasbord Studio.

The Mediahuis Ireland steering committee comprised the chief customer officer, the head of marketing and promotions, the editor-in-chief, the chief commercial officer, the director of publishing operations, and me.

We worked closely with Porter’s team while the brand architecture was being defined. Then, we delegated and got out of the way so the people close to the brand could make the right decisions. That brings me to the third principle.

3. The principle of subsidiarity

Subsidiarity is the principle of allowing the individual members of large organisations to make decisions on issues that affect them rather than leaving such decisions to those at the top.

Subsidiarity was vital in this project. With so many workstreams and stakeholders, we needed an expert group to define how the rebrand would affect their area of expertise, sign off on the work as assets were produced by the design team, and implement the changes in line with our go-live date.

This expert group involved:

• Our legal team worked on trademarking the brands and logos in the EU and UK jurisdictions.
• Our advertising department’s designers and executives outlined the necessary rebrand assets for sales and incorporated them into advertising sales collateral. They also prepared assets for B2B Web sites. The group advertising production unit reviewed and removed thousands of old ads and created assets aligned with the new branding.
• Our technical team of business analysts, project managers, testers, and engineers took requirements for third parties, including identity management systems, payment systems, ePaper providers, and app developers.
• Colleagues in Belgium updated the video player’s UI, transposed rebranded designs into the group design system, and changed the Web pages’ headers and footers. Customer teams updated all customer touchpoints on the site and apps.
• Senior editorial personnel participated in lengthy discussions to balance the identities of the titles against the need for a master brand. Editorial print designers worked closely with Porter on print templates and the new brand’s appearance across masthead, teaser panels, supplements, and magazines.
• Audience and digital editorial teams compiled the social assets that needed to be changed, outlined the necessary Canva templates, and ensured new designs and assets were fit for purpose.
• The visuals team worked with the motion graphics company to create the required video files, define how the new branding would appear in the studio, and ensure the branding was updated on the company’s big screens.
• The audio team outlined the many podcast assets that needed changed and ensured those changes were made.
• The group facilities manager organised new signage for behind reception.
• The marketing team steered the project from the initial definition of the brand architecture to tender documentation. It worked with third-party agencies to bring the new brand to life in marketing and advertising.

A lot of people were involved in the rebrand, which required great communication and coordination. But the principle of subsidiarity ensured stakeholders across the organisation actively participated in the rebrand.

Brand building is a long-term project. While we’ve unveiled a new visual direction, we’re not stopping there. We’re rolling out new marketing, defining new brand guidelines and discovering how flexible our new design system is.

The real work starts here — leveraging the new modern branding to secure the future of Independent Irish journalism for another 120 years.

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