Eurosport

Eurosport was a 26-year-old brand, established and trusted, but not loved. Its ten stars had never changed. It read as an institution, and sports fans don’t seek out institutions.

The brief was to relaunch the brand and make it more appealing to audiences. The unspoken question was to bring together two very different cultures: an organisation in Paris full of journalistic and production talent, and Discovery’s corporate headquarters in London and Washington. What I heard over months of listening was that appeal was not a branding problem. Both companies were commercially focused, but the local teams had come to think of the advertisers as their primary customers, at a cost to the viewer experience. That’s when I rewrote the brief.

The core shift was to put fans first. It was not only a marketing choice, but a cultural and operational one. Eurosport needed more than a rebrand; it needed a rebirth. The heart was already there: its talent, producers and journalists were still passionate about the sports. Talking to them, a genuine purpose emerged: Eurosport connects fans around the sports they love, to feed their passion.

We summarised the work to be done in two words: Team Up. Fans with athletes and journalists, the different parts of Eurosport and Discovery with each other, creative agencies with internal teams. Reporting to the CEO and working with the executive team, I aligned Marketing, Programming and Operations, their international counterparts at Discovery, and the external agencies. I ran the competitive pitches and, with the executive and marketing teams, selected Pentagram for the identity, DixonBaxi for the on-air graphics and campaign, and Sid Lee for the communications strategy. With Antonio Ruiz, a Discovery colleague who joined as VP Marketing, we developed a 360º campaign to coincide with the rebrand, summing up the promise to viewers: Fuel Your Passion.

For the visual identity Angus Hyland's team at Pentagram proposed to carry across only one of the stars. Ten stars echoed the European flag; one star stood for excellence. Set into the E, it also echoed the globe inside Discovery's D, so the new relationship showed up in the drawing rather than just in a press release.

The outcome was not just a logo or a tagline, but a system of symbols designed for a collective identity project. A monogram for small spaces, from social media to the on-screen bug. Red and blue kept but refreshed, with a secondary palette for stand-alone products and campaigns. The refreshed brand architecture included variations and lockups for the corporate brand, the channels, the digital products and the B2B business, so a channel, a product and a one-off event could look like Eurosport without looking the same.