This project is rebrand of and campaign for the daily live radio talk show, Forum, which has been airing since 1990. With the retirement of its previous host, Michael Krasny, and the onboarding of two new hosts, Mina Kim and Alexis Madrigal, the rebrand aimed to reintroduce the newly-formatted program to its current audience and draw in new audiences.

Through in-depth discussions with the new hosts — I visualized their hope of moving from a host-centric talk show to an audience-centric platform where people with different opinions, cultures and backgrounds find common ground.

Target Audience
Existing audience that leans older and more traditional; new younger, digital savvy and diverse audience; the 9am program with Alexis Madrigal targets local, Bay Area audiences while the 10am program with Mina Kim targets a statewide audience

Tone + Keywords
• inclusive
• community + connection
• conversation
• participation
• collective experience

I worked with the Forum team to moodboard, art direct, design, and implement the Forum logo, podcast tile, visual library, social media templates and campaign assets.

For the logo, I chose a modern serif and a traditional sans-serif, combining contrasting fonts to express the historic program's new transformation and the idea of two distinct viewpoints or differing backgrounds. I overlapped the two fonts, accentuating the parts where the fonts overlapped like a Venn diagram, to better highlight the word "Forum" and the concept of finding common ground. For the color palette, I chose the complementary colors blue and orange, further strengthens my concept of expressing two distinct entities.

Afterwards, I applied the branding across print and digital, working directly with the Product, Social and News teams. I trained the Social team on how to use the new social assets, and I also worked with the Marketing team on a large-scale campaign that included out-of-home, BART, digital billboards, and web ads.

Rebrand
Logo, graphic library, podcast tile, podcast webpage graphics, social post templates, merch (bucket hat, fanny pack, lapel pin)

Marketing Campaign
BART car ads, web ads, social ads, graphics for SF Gate homepage takeover, email graphics

Adobe Illustrator
Adobe Photoshop
Canva
Google Slides

The Forum rebrand had positive feedback, with audiences responding well to the new look. The social media team for Forum also had a positive response to working with the new templates.

I created over 100 assets for the BART and digital campaign, and the ads saw significant traffic and ad engagement, such as the ads for Google Search, which garnered a CTR of 25.32% for live listenership and 44.37% for on-demand listenership. There was also a steady increase in AQH across Forum hours with an average of a 2 spot increase in station rank, a boost in our market share during the duration of the campaign and an increase in unique and engaged (an Apple Podcast metric) listeners.