VICELAND

Role
Brand Strategy
Creative Direction
Art Direction
Design

Year
2016-2020

It's a TV Channel

Young audiences were leaving TV for digital. The networks that still held them were siloed by category: news on one channel, lifestyle on another, music on a third. Culture was treated as if it lived in boxes.

On February 29, 2016, VICE launched VICELAND, a 24-hour television network led by Spike Jonze, built to translate VICE's editorial sensibility to broadcast without diluting its voice.

Content and culture were treated as one conversation. Food, sex, fashion, music, sports, and politics lived side by side as part of the same global story. At its core, it was a channel of transparency and empathy, made by people for people to examine and understand the world.

The positioning was radically simple. VICELAND. It's a TV channel.

Unbranded Brand

All brands and advertising were shouting for attention at the time with loud and heavy brand systems. Everything was becoming homogenized. By being quiet we could be loud.

The channel had to get out of its own way. Emotion and imagery had to pass through undiluted, meaning the brand had to punctuate and inform and step back when necessary. The general principle was to let the product sell itself, with no gloss, just unfiltered content presented as purely as possible.

We reduced the identity to essential components and removed anything decorative. The channel moved easily between refined and raw, between couture and Craigslist, between gallery wall and street poster, collapsing traditional hierarchies of taste and resisting over-explanation.

The system came down to typography and motion. Typography was functional, layouts were flexible, messaging was matter of fact. The same system carried smart and curious, light and fun, deep and dangerous, without shifting posture. Animation was reduced to hard cuts and linear slides, without effects or embellishment.

The brand pulled from the street: flyers, tabloids, classifieds, the everyday visual language of how people actually live. It also functioned as a service, pointing viewers to cultural events, emerging artists, topical facts, and local goods worth knowing about. The whole point was to send the viewer back out into the world.

Online, the same philosophy held. The website prioritized readability, accessibility, and discovery over spectacle. It felt closer to a publishing platform than a network landing page.

Instead of a traditional rulebook, we produced printed brand zines. Each one focused on a specific part of the system, designed to be read and referenced like cultural pamphlets rather than corporate manuals.

Made In-House

Most networks outsource content branding to agencies, which slows production, drives up cost, and disconnects the work from the shows themselves. Everything for VICELAND was made in-house. Programming was conceived, produced, and promoted within the same ecosystem, so cohesion was inherent. Each show had a unique identity built to reflect the content and the people behind it, all stemming from key art. Over 100 pieces of content branding came out of that system.

Photography was part of the production itself. Showrunners, producers, and filmers carried extra cameras to capture the right images. Custom shoots ranged from overnight red-eyes seized on opportunity to fully pre-planned productions.

Show Up

VICELAND marketing behaved like the channel itself. The network showed up in cities, in feeds, and in conversations with the same plainspoken tone it used on-air.

At launch, newspaper ads ran with only the channel name and a phone number, inviting readers to call in and answer questions. Those voicemails became the first thirteen hours of programming on launch day.

A billboard was never just a billboard. It was a social post, a brand spot, a print ad, or all of them at once. The highest billboard in the US nodded to the channel's weed programming. A billboard in Iraq signaled that VICELAND covered the places other networks wouldn't. A phone line let audiences call in with prompts that changed based on cultural and programming events, and we amplified those voices across VICE channels. A school bus was bought and branded into a mobile billboard and content studio, driving across the US to show up at peak cultural moments and literally driving revenue.

VICELAND Brand Studio

VICELAND launched with the lowest ad load of any channel on television. Brand Studio was built to make that model work. Advertisers were embedded into the channel in ways that matched its tone instead of disrupting it. Low cost, high impact creative was developed in-house, often featuring on-air talent and employees from the office. Because it came from the same team making the shows, the creative felt like a continuation of them. T-Mobile signed on as the channel's launch partner, and other partners included Geico, Burton, Bushmills, and Mailchimp.

The channel was the entry point. Every deal extended across editorial, social, and video, and we rethought digital ad formats, including shoppable banners, to match how people actually used them.

VICELAND held the highest viewer retention rate of any channel on TV. When advertising felt like programming, viewers stayed.

Results

Special Thank You

Annie Rosen Savinar
Matt Schoen
Spencer Madsen
Janelle Anne
Magnus Atom
Sam Aldeborgh
Jim D’Amico
Eric Bubas
Marina Cacciapuoti
Nate Coonrod
Taylor English
Meika Jewett
Meghan Kirsh
Gabe Koplowitz
Adam Mignanelli
Julie Ruiz
Gabriel Tick