The Futz Butler create bold new audio identity for ITV and ITVX

London music and sound house, The Futz Butler, have just delivered an unconventional new sonic brand for ITV, including menu beds for ITV’s 5 channels and a standout mnemonic for the new streaming service, ITVX, which launches today and replaces ITV Hub.

The new audio branding forms part of an ambitious brand refresh for the UK’s largest commercial broadcaster, led by ITV’s internal creative agency ITV Creative in collaboration with design agency DixonBaxi, designed to re-introduce the brand as a global leader in the digital streaming space.

“Our vision was to build a challenging and memorable sonic identity for ITV that turns heads and changes perceptions,” explains Paul Sumpter, Creative Director at The Futz Butler. “A sound that is as bold as it is reflective of modern Britain.”

The challenge was how to create sonic branding that felt nuanced enough to work across different channels whilst having a recognisable thread: the ‘sound’ of ITV. It was also important to strike a modern, inclusive, bold and human tone.

Instead of the traditional approach of producing assets for each individual channel (ITV1, ITV2, ITV3, ITV4 and ITVBe), The Futz Butler produced a suite of overarching beds that unites the ITV family of channels together holistically. For the ITVX mnemonic the team created a sonic articulation of the ‘Spark, Amplify and Discover’ story of the visual animation created by Dixon Baxi.

The Futz Butler drew from the unlikeliest of source material to create the building blocks of the bespoke new ITV sound world, making it completely ownable to ITV. Blending Paul’s background in music with unorthodox sound design, the final audio suite of assets drew on field recordings taken outside ITV’s studios on London’s Southbank; recordings of sugar being dropped on balloons; a choir built from iPhone voice notes; bells and metallic instruments vibrating on a powerful sub-woofers; the sound of an ‘X’ (from ‘ITVX’) scratched into a LP record and sampled as a rhythm; and a Finnish zither run through a VHS player – a nod to the birth of streaming: the humble video rental store.

Tony Pipes, Executive Creative Director at ITV Creative commented: “The Futz Butler have been a pleasure to work with from day one. The work they produced was exciting, challenging and original – taking us out of our comfort zone whilst still hitting the brief and expressing the brand. How they work, the process, and the original way they approach the work is not only fascinating, but effective. It’s been a joy.”

The new sound across ITV’s family of broadcast channels was launched in November while the ITVX streaming platform launches on December 8th.