The Antenna Brand

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We are so excited to launch a new Antenna brand today. What you will physically see is a new logo and visual identity. But there is much more going on under the surface, which I would like to share more about.

Antenna launched just 18 months ago, and we took this branding project on sooner than we expected to, for two reasons. First, our company theme for this year is “foundation”. That may seem counterintuitive for a startup going through the violent contortions of the “liftoff” stage, but Rameez and I made a conscious choice to build a company which could scale very large and could last for decades. To do that, even as we are growing rapidly, we are doing our best to “measure twice and cut once.” Establishing a strong brand and identity is an important part of that.  

Second, with consumer adoption of digital subscriptions accelerating during pandemic, the Antenna brand has gained profile faster than we anticipated. The Antenna brand needs to shine under that spotlight, especially because we work every day with some of the world’s most iconic brands. 

We worked first to articulate our Mission. To do this, we turned our gaze outward to our customers, and the impact that we want to have. We are endlessly moved by these great brands, and we truly exist to help them navigate the business transformation that the subscription economy is driving. So, here is where we landed with the Antenna Mission:

To expand knowledge of subscriber behavior so brands can entertain, inspire, and empower the world.

We then focused on how we would deliver on that Mission, by codifying our Values. Our team has been intentional about developing our cultural norms, and so this locked into place very smoothly:

Act with integrity. Trust isn’t something we can claim - it’s something we earn. And not just once, but with every action we take. Our success relies on the confidence the industry places in us and the confidence we place in each other. That’s why doing the right thing for us is never a choice, it’s the only option.

Engage with diligence. Our work is defined by the care and precision we bring to every detail. In our relentless pursuit of knowledge, we ask and answer all the questions we can. We move faster and scale larger by getting things deeply right the first time.

Communicate with respectful candor. Effective and open discourse is an act of respect. It enables growth by requiring participants to interact with empathy and orient around solutions. It also helps us move faster together by eliminating the meta-work that opaqueness generates.

With that foundation in place, we moved on to the visual identity. We were so delighted to partner with Robert Balog and Topher Burns from territorial for this work. Robert actually led the branding work for my startup, BuzzMetrics, almost two decades ago. And we have been creative partners for much longer than that - he was the singer in my high school band!

The brand “Antenna” has a dual meaning to us. First, it is a strong metaphor for our actual business - we are both a receptor of consumer behavior signals, and also a transmitter of insights to our clients. Second, we knew that we were going to launch our business first for the Entertainment category, and we wanted a brand that would pay homage to that heritage, even as we extend into other consumer subscription categories. Antenna is a fun and relevant nod to the Media ecosystem which is so important to Rameez and me.

Given this significance - and the fact that the letter “A” physically resembles an antenna - we wanted the logo to represent our name. Our old logo did this in too literal a manner, but Territorial found a wonderful way to gracefully convey the concept.  When it came to color, we wanted a simple scheme which would allow the data to do most of the talking. We did choose a strong yellow as our signature color. It is another nod to our heritage, as we think of it like a stage spotlight. And there’s an easter egg there too; the specific shade is pulled directly from the yellow brick road in “Wizard of Oz”. That movie’s use of color film was an important moment of technological innovation for the entertainment industry, and we also could not resist the “path to enlightenment” metaphor!

Starting today, you will see the new identity across all of our endpoints, most notably, a new website (thanks to Smashing Boxes for the dev work!). It was a fulfilling project for all of us, and we hope it makes our data and insights shine a little brighter.