Branding campaign and election coverage: Challenges and muddying of the waters

ABC News stuck with its wordy and cluttered ‘Your Voice. Your Vote’ branding, though many of its promos strayed from it and, in fact, didn’t even reference the name at all. 

This promo instead used the straightforward ‘Election Night’ branding but, for consistency, perhaps could have at least referenced the network’s campaign and election branding. 

The ‘Your Voice. Your Vote’ logo was placed on the large, circular LED in the middle of ABC’s Election Headquarters. Like NBC, however, ABC introduced another name into the mix here — labeling its set as the ‘ABC News Election Headquarters’ — which could be confused with Fox News’ branding (see below) which, although stylizing the word ‘headquarters’ as ‘HQ,’ is typically read out as the full word on air. That said, combining the ‘Your Voice. Your Vote’ name into a phrase to describe a ‘center’ is a bit clunky.

ABC O&Os, such as WLS in Chicago, stuck with the ‘Vote 2018’ branding, putting it in a similar neighborhood as NBC’s ‘The Vote.’ It’s worth noting, however, that, at least in the Chicago market, ‘The Vote’ wasn’t used locally. This could have been strategic.