In December 2017, Bloomberg Quicktake launched the first ever 24/7 video news network built exclusively on Twitter. While other online news services used social media to compel users to “click through” to their website, we wanted to meet users where they were. The vision: leverage Bloomberg’s global news coverage, business insights, and data-driven storytelling to deliver users the news they needed directly on social media — without sacrificing the depth of our analysis. As we expanded to other social media platforms like YouTube and Instagram, our objective remained focused on designing video storytelling formats that adapted to the needs of the users on each social platform.
As the patterns of news consumption rapidly change, we remain committed to our mission to meet users where they are. In November 2020, we launched a streaming news channel, adding a 24 hour live stream news feed to the already popular short, bite sized clips for social. Bloomberg Quicktake expanded its reach from social media to streaming platforms like Apple TV, Roku, and Amazon Fire. Reaching beyond social reflected a broader ambition: to reimagine what it means to be a “news network” in today’s complex, cross-platform digital landscape. From a brand perspective, it meant reimagining the kind of relationship we build with our audience. It meant developing a brand whose identity is defined not by the way that it remains the same, but by the way that it adapts.
Our rebrand strategy was inspired by a core principle: Our system is not static; it moves. It moves because video moves. But more importantly, it moves because our users move. They move when they digitally scroll and shift devices, and when they physically stroll and shift environments. Bloomberg Quicktake had to be a brand that moves with them.
This is one reason, leading up to launch, we decided on a new name: Bloomberg Quicktake. Our new name, “Quicktake”, was an opportunity to instill our new brand with a value that was part of our Bloomberg Media DNA: speed. We move in-step with our fast paced news consumer, ready with an insightful take to give. The new logo for Bloomberg Quicktake not only had to convey that sense of movement. It had to do it. It had to move. We executed the graphic design and the motion design at the same exact time, so that the one naturally stemmed from the other.
If our logo could move on screen, it could just as easily move off. We felt this was a good thing. Why? The reality is: our moments with our quick-moving users are often ephemeral, especially on social. In these brief moments, first and foremost, we want to deliver our users stories they value. We did not want our visual branding to get in the way. We needed a way to reinforce our brand identity without stealing the show. For this reason, we made it a tenet that our new logo’s visual form be abstractable. A building block that could implicitly reinforce our brand when serving our graphic storytelling needs. Those building blocks were a line and a circle – basic shapes that are embedded in our original “Bloomberg” logo, and that, in a fresh new way, form our title-case Q.
Three values drove how this abstracted brand language could move and behave: Bloomberg Quicktake is global; it is data-driven, it is human. The first two especially are deeply rooted in our Bloomberg identity. Bloomberg’s coverage is global, with one of the largest newsrooms in the world; we are a window to diverse perspectives that help make sense of the news of today. We explored “windows” and “portals” as graphic tropes in our brand vocabulary. Bloomberg’s coverage is also data-driven. Our origins are in the Bloomberg Terminal – the world’s leading financial news and data-analysis software. It’s in our DNA to deliver users real-time, data-driven insights as part of our news coverage, too. We explored “processing” as a graphic trope, and a palette that uses the concept of “light” to convey illumination and insight. Finally, Bloomberg Quicktake is human, which is core to our being a video medium. We tell stories through the people and experts who live them. We explored ways our motion graphics could convey not only a computer’s “processing” but also, a human’s “thinking,” and we countered our “light” colors with deeper backdrop tones that help the people on screen shine.
The outcome of our launch has not only seen dramatic growth across all platforms, but the validation of a new kind of network ecosystem across them – one in which audience engagement for one platform has strategically correlated with engagement on another. We have realized that as a news service, we are not just a broadcaster that a viewer might turn on or off. We want to think of ourselves as a companion that both guides and follows our users throughout the day, picking up in one moment where we left off in the last.
But more than validating the business and user value of expanding and rebranding as a cross-social and -OTT network, we have tapped into a new arena of learnings. We have been very busy post-launch collecting qualitative and quantitative feedback from users, both via cross-platform metrics and via live interviews and focus groups. We intend to adapt the system we have built as new user patterns emerge, and to nourish the system we have, so it delivers better and better every day.
