ITV Launch New Promo Styles

Yes, it was used very briefly, from early September until the launch of the new ITV logo a few weeks later. I do vividly remember it, though, because it seemed so unusual to have a coherent trailer style on ITV.

September 1998 was something of a pivotal month in ITV because there were quite a few changes to the schedules - The Bill became an hour long and was initially just once a week, so there were quite a lot of new pre-watershed programmes, plus you had Millionaire on every night of course and the first signs of David Liddiment's commissions. It all seemed quite radical, partly because in the previous years ITV schedules had been really regimented and familiar with drama at 9pm virtually every night. Then of course we got the big, big changes the following March.

What's interesting is that earlier in 1998 it looks like they'd done a pre-NPU change where they went back to a previous way of making trailers, back to by the looks of things each region making trailers for their own programmes but intended for national consumption, and referred to as being on 'ITV', so a semi-coherent look.

For the previous couple of years before 1998 all trailers and presentation was fully regionally branded with network programmes being advertised as being 'On Yorkshire/On Central etc', basically each region making all their own promos.

Still love that clock, 'let's repeat our logo 12 times'!

How did it used to work for trails? Say YTV were promoting a Corrie episode. Would Granada provide clips to any region that wanted it and they'd edit a trail as they saw fit? My 1982 clip on YouTube has a seasonal network trail and someone mentioned it's in the TVS font so presumably certain regions were given the task of doing those?

I suspect when all the mergers started happening that duplicating trails was one of the first things to be stopped.

Yes, it was a weird transitional time. Unlike some regions, Granada had always done most of its own trailers, particularly once the blue stripe look came in, in 1990. It seems the large ITV companies shared the responsibility in early 1998 with different regions' announcers popping up in other parts of the country. Even then, the regions added their own ITV logo and end board (if opting to use one). Granada-owned regions used an ITV logo encased in a semi-transparent rectangle, which was a modification of what LWT had been using for their own trailers. Carlton used a boxless white ITV, as did its conquests, Westcountry & Central; but Central initially added a lefthand margin for the endboard which had the cake animating in it (which I think they were using already with their own trailers) until the Cake got ditched in the Spring. Meridian and Anglia used the same white ITV logo as Carlton but used those tropical-coloured endboards that they'd been using for a good while. Interesting that in September, once the NPU was operational, Carlton's white ITV logo was used but when the new logo arrived a month later, they used something more like what the Granada stations had been using.

Grampian didn't use them AFAIK -- they were still taking locally-branded promos from Border, as they had done for a number of years.

There were a number of different approaches running concurrently in the 70s through the early 90s.

Each ITV company producing a programme would send out two copies of a promo (for Corrie in your example). One was ITV-branded (although there was never a consistent design for these, and companies would usually just use their in-house style with the name changed). Most of the larger companies would make a parallel version with their own branding. And they'd also send out the same compilation clean with no captions, music or voiceover, for stations not using the ITV branding (like Central) to produce locally.

Some of the smaller stations (Southern, Anglia and HTV were three, I'd imagine the like of Border and Grampian as well, and Tyne Tees were still doing this occasionally in 1992) would sometimes just put out the clean promo as-is, with a caption and voiceover added live.

There were also seasonal trails/menu promos, where the production of these alternated between the big five for the network, well, seasonally. By 1989 production of these were centralised at Thames/LWT.

Come 1993 most of this started to be disbanded, and by 1995 all the regions were making promos regionally (Yorkshire/TT being one of the last, oddly, in September 1994).

You could tell which trailers came from Leeds in 1998 and ones from London, as the LWT ones had the nice 3d animations going on and ended with the nice endboard with a picture of the programme in the 3d symbol, the only consistancy here was the font and the rectangular ITV logo. Leeds initially used this as well and then ditched it which at the time I wasnt impressed, now looking on Youtube it looks like for example Heartbeat, the Leeds produced version would have gone to Tyne Tees and Granada, but LWT did their own thing with the 3d animations and modified the logo to LWT in the rectangular ITV style.

I got to say it did make for interesting viewing though even though I am sure it was an expensive exercise with so many regions involved making the trailers.

The were some real monstrosities from Channel in that era, with the Meridian logo being badly covered with a Channel one.

There were also Granada-produced promos at the start (March or so of 1998). They were very similar to the Leeds ones but the caption generator they were using was of a notably inferior quality to the Leeds one and the voiceovers were muffled and sometimes run into clipping -- that said, at the time I was pleased that at least some of the promos didn't use the dreary and dated YTV announcers. I think Granada were still making their own promos in parallel with these in a similar manner to LWT.

These disappeared after a few weeks and all the Granada programmes' promos came from Leeds -- it was only a few months after this (around July) that we started to see some Central/Carlton ones -- still with a distinctly different style to the LWT/YTV ones for a period. ISTR that Central did not take the YTV/LWT ones though.

These ITV promos started exactly one week before the change from C3NE back to Tyne Tees -- so I suspect the rebranding of TT was timed specifically so they didn't have to create a load of TTTV branding for only a short period.

Some strange end boards in this one from Granada. Note the two trailers towards the end, who almost manage to match but don't quite manage it. One being from Carlton, one being from Yorkshire.

That was the standard endboard from the time (March 1998, before YTV stopped bothering with the animation). The first of those two is LWT rather than Carlton -- as I mentioned the Carlton/Central ones weren't shown on the Granada North stations for a few months.

Here are a few more from the time:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ajrCOC_FD8

One other thing to mention about these is that the local trails from this time had the regional logo in the same form as the ITV one but on the top left rather than top right. The Central/Carlton ones had the ITV logo in the top left, and it was a plain white ITV non-inverted.

Ultimately in around August of 1998, the YTV/LWT trails moved to the same formatting of the ITV logo as Carlton were using.

That video also has one of the ads from the time Opal Fruits changed to Starburst- those adverts from the time really give me the impression that even they didn't like the name change but had it forced on them. I remember a similar sarcastic ad campign when Jif became Cif.